Many of us have started out writing small HTML pages, then transitioned those into SSI, and from there, into Perl, and then embellished those into more-complicated "systems", and probably even larger portal systems.

So then you move to templating systems, HTML::Template, Text::Template, mod_perl, CGI.pm, and combinations of all of the above, to achieve what you want.

I've done the same thing... too many times. Rolling a "portal" from scratch is no fun.

But now I'm at an impasse. I'm going to be (re)writing and fixing my existing "portal" sites, and I need some philosophy and experiences from other fellow monks as to the choices I should be making.

mod_perl is a must, so that can't go away, and these are heavily database and system-tool-driven portalesque sites. Those are immovable requirements. These sites are all VERY heavily-hit, so lean and fast with some modicum of caching is a must, but being able to lower maintenance and upkeep is also heavy on the requirements.

So the question is: Mason? TemplateToolkit? Others? And why?

I've played around with the PHP-based portals and CMS systems such as Drupal, e107, and even the Python-based Zope portals (Plone) as well as dozens of other alternatives but they really weren't flexible enough to be anything more than a "super-blog".

Santa brought me the mod_perl Developer's Cookbook and the Mason O'Reilly book early this year, and I will be digesting those over the next few days to get up to speed with some of the innards of the two.

Should I be looking at others? Any gotchas? Foibles? Kinks in my plan?