All the languages are more than capable for your purpose. Perl's big advantage is CPAN, most everything you would ever want to do (plus quite a lot that you won't) is there, easily available and free. The other languages aren't quite so well-endowed.

Beyond the presonal preference stakes between, a BDSM language like Python, a "Here's the rope. Pull" language like Perl, and a very clean, orthoganal, very-OO, if somewhat slower language like Ruby, then possible deciding factors might be:

• Which language do you and the other partisipants know best?
• How complex a site are you putting together. If you can find what you need amongst the other languages repositories, Python's PyPI with 300+ packages or Runy's RAA with it's 1000+ packages, then that could be a deciding factor.

  CPAN has several thousand individual packages, possibly an order of magntude more than either of the others, and probably several alternatives for any use that you might think of, but that in itself isn't necessarily a complete recommendation.

  The problem comes not only from finding the module(s) that do what you want and deciding which is best for your purpose, but also from working out which ones are robust, efficient, well-documented, well-supported and well-designed for their purpose.

Were I currently in the position of taking on the task you have, I think that I would start by coming up with a paper design for the website. A set of storyboards or use cases or whatever your preferred mthod would be. From that I would hope to get a feel for the complexity and nature of the task.

1. Will it be mostly static or mostly dynamic pages.
2. Will the number of the pages tend to grow slowly or rapidly.
3. What sort of hit rates am I expecting?
4. Will a single server site be sufficient for the forseable future or do I antisipate having to move to a load-balanced environment?
5. What would be the consequenses of of the site being off-air due to break-downs?
6. Is security a major issue?
7. Is a the use of a database an necessary or desirable criteria of the site?

I think that only once you can answer these questions, and no doubt many of the more web-experienced monks will extend this list considerably, will you be in a position to know exactly what the task is you are facing and therefore what external modules (or even whole application frameworks) would be useful to you.

Only then will your decision be able to based on more than personal preferences for one style of programming (language) over another.