Fellow monks:

I've spent many hours each day of the last month learning as much about Perl and CGI as possible. I'm proud of the progress I've made and I've already written a few short but useful scripts. But now I'm interested in "graduating" myself to an intermediate level of Perl expertise by writing a more extensive and complex script. The goal I've set for myself is to create a web-based utility similar to this. So, yes, I am aware this idea has been done. As I said, I'm doing this for the experience.

Some of the basic requirements for this calendar are:
***It's searchable
***It is large enough to extend back one year in time and out one year into the future
***Others can post to it
***Postings must be approved by me
***It can handle repeat events (e.g. third Thursdays of every month)
***It's easy to add and edit entries
***It has a user-friendly interface (clickable text-based calendars, etc.)
***Speed...all web pages will be straight .html and created only when changed/edited.

I know something like this would be best handled with a database but I haven't learned anything about web-based databases yet. So instead, I thought about using a flat file directory tree structure to mimmick a calendar. I would have a "Year 2001" folder which contains its respective .html files and 12 folders for each month. Each of the 12 folder would contain the appropriate .html files and 30/31 text and .html files for each day. The text files would hold the actual data.

My questions to my brother monks:
Does this flat file approach sound like killing an ant with a shotgun? Is there a better, more efficient approach I should be looking into?
What modules would be most useful to me?
Any other general recommendations or helpful guidance I should consider before I start?

In reply to General guidance requested by nysus

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