Amusingly, my static site generator CMS does precisely the reverse of what's done here. During development/updating of the website, all pages and posts are entries in an SQLite database that is manipulated through a web interface that present an editable version of the website. And then the website is dumped as static pages to the file system to be deployed directly and/or downloaded as a zip and uploaded anywhere else for deployment (including entirely static hosting services).
I use Zola for now, but for a variety of reasons I'm contemplating building my own to let me tweak stuff a bit more flexibly, and this kind of approach has been on my mind. How has it been working for you?
It works great. I actually build it for a few friends initially and now I have about a hundred people using it, mostly for personal web pages (which it was designed for), but not only. I also use it to manage the websites of my uni department and research group for example, at https://informatique.up8.edu/ [website is in french].
A warning: the code is not written to be pretty, it's written to be simple and effective. The initial goal being to have the whole software in a single PHP file that could even be used offline to produce a fully static website.
