I will put the suggestion out there that you could install The Template Toolkit along with the Template CPAN module. Especially with a mod_perl environment, this creates a very simple yet efficient tool. Your template for a content page could turn out to look something like the following:

[% INCLUDE html_header.tmpl
    pagetitle="Sample Page"
%]

<p>
    This is the content for this page.
</p>

[% INCLUDE html_footer.tmpl %]
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