I'm not a PHP fan like yourself though. I have used Ghost before. Then I played with **numerous** static site generators.  Ended up really liking Grav (getgrav.org) even though it uses PHP on the server side. It's ultimately much more powerful than a static site generator but much less complex than a bloated WP install. I'd choose flat-files over a standard database any day.  :)

It would be interesting to use the blockchain instead of flat-files for sure.