Ok, so i picked ikiwiki as the website engine. It turned out to be pretty much everything i wanted from a website engine.

Here is a list of my requirements from a few years back (yes, it's been that long):

None of the current blogs suit my need, what i want is a blog that uses a proper template (preferrably XSLT) instead of the current wave of hideous multifile template systems. Also i want to blog to be as static as possible, There is no need to regenerate each page when it's viewed, most pages never change anyways. And then there is one big requirement, I don't want a database backend.

How do these relate to ikiwiki?

1. Proper templating system: ikiwiki uses a sane template system, none of those .pre + .post + .middle style of templates.
2. Static rendering: all of the pages served are actually static html files built by ikiwiki. In fact, my webserver doesn't currently have ikiwiki installed at all, i just build the website locally.
3. No database: YAY! There is no database required. If i want a datastore, i'll use a version control system.

All in all ikiwiki looks like the solution for me. Previously i've considered using subwiki, but it never got off the ground. I kind of like ikiwiki even though it's written in perl, which looks like a big mess once you get used to python =)

What is best, is that no matter how the pages were created, i'm able to edit them with simple tools like vim or any other text editor.