I would like to know more about how you are doing things and what you mean by breaking the homepage into small templates.

I am using a MySQL db to populate variables.

Also, I'm afraid I'm using H::T to swap out large chunks of HTML, depending on whether a user is entering a new record or editing an old, avoiding using 2 templates, one for each. It's a toss-up: do you want to edit the design in 2 files or make it harder to edit the design in just one, but more complicated file? I don't know.