I just don't see the point to this kind of stuff.. =/
For high traffic apps, Varnish is the answer as you don't hit the application layer.
If you think that's too complicated, try nginx-memcached - also an excellent solution.
If not that, try django's template caching with memcached - also extremely fast but will hit the application layer.
If you're in some shared hosting environment (you probably are too small still to warrant this kind of aggressive caching on static assets - but hey, efficiency never hurt anybody :P) without access to memcached, use django's cache backend with a file based cache. It's almost 100% as what this does and you don't have any additional overhead.
Beats me why people are re-inventing the wheel - or am I missing something ?
Thats kinda neat, I suspect this will be used a lot. I did something similar to this 5-6 years ago with wget but this is a lot more elegant IMHO.
Very cool project, thanks for open sourcing it. I was looking for this type of library this week and found medusa and aymcms.
Does it handle images? How about multiple sites/subdomains?
Why all these static site generators? Just use Varnish, it is the static site generator for any and all frameworks.
"The process that actually generates the output simply uses (or abuses) Django’s internal testclient to request each URL and store the resulting data"
It warms my heart to see another example of test client abuse. We used the test client to implement a pure Python ESI processor[1]. We ran it in production for awhile, but no one should ever do that. Varnish is the answer. The code was still running on our development machines when I left.
[1] https://github.com/armstrong/armstrong.esi/