Hi guys and thanks for the replies. I checked out the /StaticExporter. This is quite crude but sort of does the job. What I'm really after and what you're probably working on now I'd wager is something like this:
* A specific CMS admin screen allows one to configure the username, host and target directory to statically deploy to using rsync. (Secure rsync will of course depend on the user having an SSH agent running in the background (Unix-like systems)).
* In the CMS view the "Save and Publish" button has a checkbox next to it labeled "deploy".
* Checking this box and pushing this button (Admin/editor users only) securely rsyncs static content to predetermined target server(s).
We currently use Zope/Plone to deploy to 3 public-facing webservers as Plone is dog slow and a bit of a resource-hogger (The CMS itself sits behind our LAN) but it's required a bit of Python hacking to get it to work as above. If this sort of functionality could be offered by Sliverstripe out of the box, you'd be blowing most of the other CMS's out of the water in terms of functionality.
A would-like-to-have would be switches (checkboxes) next to each listed target deployment server so that you can arbitrarily choose not to deploy to specific machines...
Thanks heaps guys.