Linda

I have just started looking at WP as an alternative to MT, and this might be one issue that would make me hesitate.
If I understand things correctly, WP applies some markup to the code it generates apart from what is found in the supplied CSS file, rather than just generating ‘plain’ tags without any markup at all?
Or am I misunderstanding what’s discussed? ??

Thanks for the pointers. ??
So far, I haven’t found anyone doing quite what I need with static pages, but I too need to learn more php to be able to use the program properly. ??

Hmm … I see, might have to hold off on WP a while longer still. The setup I currently have is pretty non-standard.
How about output from a blog being published on several pages in multiple directories? I use a ‘dynamic content within static pages’ approach (which I don’t yet know if it will work with WP), and apart from having a main page for each blog, I need to pull in content from specific categories on some separate pages residing in subdirectories under the directory with the main page.

Hmm … I have to admit, I can’t quite see how that would work. Most of the pages where I want to include dynamic content has a lot of static content beyond just the blog content. Essentially, the blog content functions like snippets of news on an otherwise static page.
After looking at some example sites, I was thinking that maybe what I need to do to manage this mix is to include the right code from index.php as well as the right parameters to display a certain kind of posts right on the pages in question, rather than to dynamically feed the parameters to the pages. If I am understanding things even remotely correctly, that ought to mean that a specific page will always load the same blog(s) or category/categories.
Not sure how one would combine that with archives though. Perhaps with a few separate archives.php files, since it does look like those would need to be entirely dynamically generated. Unless the main pages can be setup so that if you don’t feed it a parameter, load the default parameter, otherwise load what was fed to it, to enable archives on the same page.
Anyone know if I am moving in the right direction? ??

In particular (since it seems you can’t edit your post), I am looking for guides that show how you can replicate the most common things done in SSI with PHP.
Also, do perl/cgi scripts work on .php pages? I presume I’ll need to change anything referring to .html, but that should be doable … I think.

Again, thanks for all the replies. Lets see if I can sort through them and give some coherent responses. ?? I think I am starting to understand how things works, but I may be wrong. ??
I like the idea of a database backend as such, and I suppose it is correct that what I am using is a semi-dynamic setup. I am, in fact, already using MT’s mySQL option, so a mySQL backend is just fine as well.
If I am understanding this correctly, I could migrate my site to .php rather than .html endings and then put the various php database calls (or whatever they’re called) into as many of these .php files as I want to pull in WordPress content into, mixing it with the static content? And I could, for example, pull in all recent entries into one file, and in another I could pull in just a few recent entries from a specific category?
If my understanding is accurate, that sounds like it would work pretty well, since I could still work on the actual pages offline as I am used to. It’d just be a matter of finding a good way to redirect from .html to .php (but I believe it can be done in .htaccess) and learning at least something about how php works, in particular php includes to replace my SSI.
Can anyone recommend any good guides for starting off with php? I don’t really want to learn the language, as such, just learn how to setup php pages and do some basic stuff. ??

Thanks for the replies. ??
It sounds good that static output is in the works, so I might hold off on switching over until that happens.
The way I have gotten used to managing my site doesn’t really work very well for having static pages pulled into the dynamic ones, or having pages that appear static but are pulled from the database.
I do most of my work on the site offline, and I find it a lot more awkward to have to update templates or content in a database compared to just being able to upload my static pages and have the only generated content be pulled into these using some inclusion method. And since most of the site is static, it just seems to make more sense to pull the dynamic content into the static pages rather than vice versa. My blog isn’t even on the index page, it is just pulled into numerous sub-pages of the site where I want to display little news snippets.
I am considering possibly switching from .html to .php endings with my next redesign, but I’d still be looking at using php includes (instead of ssi includes) rather than fully generating each page, and if I understand correctly, WordPress wouldn’t currently work with this method either?
Actually, can WordPress currently have multiple index templates, for example one including the whole blog and one for each category including just teh category entries?