perhaps Brian Ng's http://search.cpan.org/~brianng/HTML-DynamicTemplate-0.95/DynamicTemplate.pm will be helpful?
"Template variables may be set within the template itself with the special $SET directive. This is useful when setting variables for use by included templates. Example: $SET(PAGE_TITLE, "What's New"). Note: Be sure to escape quotes (") and closing parantheses ()) as HTML entities."

or Sam Tregar's own extensions, notably HTML::Template::Expr? (and there's a listserv, http://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/html-template-users)

...the Philip Janert article at http://www.perl.com/pub/a/2007/02/02/htmltemplate-widgets.html appears (IMO, at first glance] to be a tad off target, but I'm still trying to chew on a few of the observations there because of a nagging sense that they apply to your issues. (Oh, disclaimer, again: Aside from the previous disclaimer ("ignorance") one should note that I have been wrong before; perhaps even more than once.)

In reply to Re^3: Abstracting away layout details when using large HTML::Template-based sites? by ww
in thread Abstracting away layout details when using large HTML::Template-based sites? by skx

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.