Well as you can probably guess I'm a mod_perl/perl newbie, trying to feel my way along learning as I go. What you say makes perfect sense, but heres some of my search code anyway.

#!/usr/bin/perl -W

use CGI qw(param);
use CGI::Carp qw(fatalsToBrowser);
use DBIx::FullTextSearch;
use DBIx::FullTextSearch::StopList;
use DBI;
use HTML::Template;
use HTML::Template::Expr;

my $dbh = DBI->connect('dbi:mysql:search','??????','??????') or die("C
+ould not connect to database");
my $cbh = DBI->connect('dbi:mysql:cobra3','??????','??????') or die("C
+ould not connect to database");
my $search = param("search_string");
my $fts = DBIx::FullTextSearch->open($dbh, '??????');

my @files = $fts->search($search);

if (@files)
{
    foreach $filename(@files){
      $filename = substr($filename,0,-4);

      my $sth = $cbh->prepare("SELECT id, title, summary FROM  resourc
+e WHERE id =?");
      $sth->execute($filename);

        while (my $ref = $sth->fetchrow_hashref()){

        my $title = $ref->{title};
        my $id = $ref->{id};

        push @rows, { ID => $id, TITLE => $title };

    }
  }
}

my $template = HTML::Template->new(filename => 'ee_search.tmpl');

$template->param(SEARCH_STRING => $search);
$template->param(ROWS => \@rows);

print "Content-type: text/html\n\n";
print $template->output;
[download]

I know this is a big hint for me but I use 'strict' I get an error, I'm not sure how to assign the $filename and @rows to an explicit package name???