It's also worth noting that Smashing Magazine is not just articles (and comments), but also a full E-commerce, job board, event page, ticket checkout and introduced a new membership section with subscriptions.

Obviously all of that can still be done with a static front-end today (and with one front-end instead of 4 different ones), but that's actually what's newsworthy and it's hardly what anyone would traditionally think of as a "static website" :)