serving static content with rails

I have a website that is a good mix of dynamic and static content. There are also a lot of pages where just a little bit of it is dynamic, like displaying if a user is logged in or other personal touches. I also want to be able to add more dynamic parts to static pages as needed without having to move the page to a different location (from /public to app/views/someview). Being able to use the layouts is one big motivator here, as the header section has quite a bit of content and right now it's just included in the top of about 50 static pages. The site in question isn't going to be getting all that much traffic. Maybe 100,000 hits or so per day once it gets rolling.

One more thing I'd like to do is to have rails render .html files, and also be able to keep the full filename in the url. This is a 'would be nice to have but not required' feature.

I found the following info which looks like what I'm after:

http://snafu.diarrhea.ch/blog/4

Anyone else done something similiar?

Chris

A bit off topic but related. Our web developers all use dreamweaver. Using things like layouts to render a header/footer always creates problems for our designers. What is the most efficient way to use dreamweaver when the file you are uploading does not contain the header/footer sections?