I'm using Wordpress for a project because of the wealth of existing templates and plugins. Without these Wordpress is not terribly interesting; it's not Wordpress.
Once you drop the ecosystem there are plenty of alternative to creating static or near-static sites.
edit: I should point out that more alternatives for creating Web content is, on average, a Good Thing. Presenting a tool, however good, as an alternative to Wordpress however brings a lot of assumptions that may cause people to focus on the wrong things.
There's probably a market for a form of Wordpress that could use existing themes but not plugins, and only allowed basic posts and pages, with perhaps a more robust security model. E.g. prevent commenting (in order to avoid having to accept external content) except via Disqus or something.
True. I hadn't done any PHP coding in many years, and knew essentially nothing about how WP worked, but Google + tenacity = useful results. Shortcodes, for example; super cool.
There are plenty of WTF moments in PHP and Wordpress but nothing that prevents pragmatic results.
Worth mentioning though, that level of easy extensibility, combined with Wordpress' absurd popularity, makes it very easy to get into trouble. It's the Internet Explorer of the blogging world.
If you don't like WordPress[1], and don't want your authors/editors to have to know any programming, but you do want fast cheap and easily hackable PHP for the CMS itself, consider a free open source alternative called TextPattern:
The separation of editing and design roles in the admin is worthwhile as well.
// 1. Having built and hosted multiple WP sites scaling to millions of uniques a day, and even having built and managed a WP install for the most notorious domain name in the world, I have to say I don't advise it for most cases.
To help people evaluate alternatives for creating static sites, I built this live dashboard comparing the Github activity of the leading static site generators.
Once you drop the ecosystem there are plenty of alternative to creating static or near-static sites.
edit: I should point out that more alternatives for creating Web content is, on average, a Good Thing. Presenting a tool, however good, as an alternative to Wordpress however brings a lot of assumptions that may cause people to focus on the wrong things.
There's probably a market for a form of Wordpress that could use existing themes but not plugins, and only allowed basic posts and pages, with perhaps a more robust security model. E.g. prevent commenting (in order to avoid having to accept external content) except via Disqus or something.