in reply to Design vs. Code vs. Maintenance

This probably isn't the answer you're looking for either, but have you thought about using PHP? We use PHP quite a bit because:

  1. It was easy for me to learn, already knowing Perl.
  2. It performs reasonably well in CGI or Apache module mode.
  3. Relatively fast development cycle.
  4. Many hosting providers offer it without significantly increasing costs.
Of course, it has its drawbacks.
  1. No CPAN
  2. Not quite as elegant as Perl
  3. Not as good at regular expressions
  4. Not Perl :)

PHP has "include" functions for importing the things you want to use over and over. We use includes for the headers and footers so that the page content is separated from the page navigation and look-and-feel..

I would not recommend PHP for anything where you want to have some very powerful functionality and have a tight deadline. It can be quite tedious to do serious application development...at least in comparison to Perl.