drgroove- thanks for replying, at least now I know I'm looking in the right places!
essentially what happened was a ton of my google search results pointed to sourceforge projects so i didnt actually go to sourceforge and do a fresh search from there. On google I tried different combinations/arrangements of the terms : php, CMS, publish, bake, render, static html, etc. Majority of the results were great php CMSs, but disappointingly, after actually looking deeper, reading the features/specs, found one after another that they didnt actually publish/save static html output as I wanted, the word "static html" was just used coincidentally on the same page but talking about something else (like "our php CMS uses static html for templates"! ). Then there were results where there were people like me asking for something like this (and thats how I found the laughingmeme.org posting) . There were solutions that did output static html but were commercial $$ solutions. And then of course there were the plenty of tutorials on how to go about writing such a php > static html script yourself, but again thats a last resort thing if I really can't find a simple php CMS that has this feature ready-made.
now, doing a google site search of sourceforge
http://www.google.com/search?num=100&q=site%3Asourceforge.net+php+static+html
did show up some results I hadnt seen yet that might be promising so I;ll look into that (see, the top result is someone talking about wiki static html output, and its currently a half-developed thing he's trying to get done. but even if it were finished, a wiki site isnt quite what I need, what I need is more of just a simple brochure-like site rather than a communty-collaboration content system... unless I have to rip out all the collab features :) )
but I will keep looking, google and sourceforge alike.
Hotscripts - I'm glad you mentioned Hotscripts because that's not something that I remember coming up on google, and I think I know why now- must log in to read an article and thats probably if there were articles on what I wanted they probably weren't crawled by google.
a search on hotscripts:
http://www.hotscripts.com/cgi-bin/search.cgi?bool=AND&query=static+html&catid=all
brings up several results, like the tutorial-type result "Static HTML Generation With PHP and MySQL " which would something I'd visint as a last resort.
The "SparkPlug CMS " is an example of one of the many commercial solutions I saw that DO output static html , but are commercial $$$.
"php2Static " script seems the most promising so far, but again its not part of an existing CMS so I'll be doing some customizing work if I go with that, I'll look further into that
I guess the reason a php-CMS that also outputs static html seems so hard to find is because someone who develops a php based CMS , since they are making something for a php-enabled server they wouldnt normally think about also outputing static html.
Re: why do I want static .html output rather than php that users see:
I just see so many advantages, so many little things that could be solved if the end product is static html. In addition to this charity site, the ability to publish static html might be something I'll encounter later on anyway (maybe I have to develop sites later that are high traffic enough they actually need caching specifically in the form of static html ) so I thought its a good idea to play with this early on.
With the charity itself, its still not clear how this cash-strapped charity is going to get this hosted. Ideally they'll get a php-enabled server by the time I finish the site, then I just transfer it over and everything is good, no real need to output static html then. But what if they don't get a php-enabled server and can only get static, then by having a CMS that outputs static html they still have site they can show. And I wouldnt have wasted any time either because even though they cant access the CMS yet, on my end I would be benefiting by being able to update/manage their site faster/easier because of this CMS I set up while developing it locally.
Theres also the issue of portability, its very likely they will often need to have a copy of their site on hand they can put on disk, so having a CMS being able to generate a static html site makes that easier.
very tired now.. not sure if everything here makes sense but thanks anyway for responding and I appreciate anyone who can respond to this