I never claimed seamlessly :) What I meant was that any CGI script using CGI.pm should be able to be run from the commandline. For large sites, I currently use Text::Template to import/interpret templates (much like HTML::Template, etc), but I write the resulting HTML to flat files that the webserver serves. (even mod_perl has problems hitting the speed of flat HTML). With flat files holding content, I can manipulate the pages with scripts and other *nix tools such as grep, ispell, etc.

Of course, this prevents me from having truly user-specific dynamic pages, so I write any of those with CGI perl scripts. When those scripts become large portions of the site, mod_perl is clearly a better solution. But it's a different mindset.

Tom Christiansen floated a paper across Usenet awhile back that you should try to get if possible, named "GUIs Considered Harmful".

I'll look for it, thanks