Are you familiar with the expression, "Time to pay the price?" If you wrote a CMS from scratch and you are, as you say, not a programmer with no wish to become one, I can all but guarantee that it will have serious security issues in addition to performance problems that will not keep up with high traffic (100,000+ dynamic views per day?).

Are you familiar with the expression, "The last 10% of a project takes 90% of the time?" You may be a long way from finishing. Consider spending an entire day Googling and reading through other software and projects to see if what you want is already done by someone else. I'm all for reinventing the wheel for one's own edification but if you try to do it for a real, busy site your first time outta the blocks, success is not in the cards.

If you do finish or want to get more serious about it, update your Perl library with some fresh tomes and ask one specific question at a time here. As perrin said, FastCGI (Perl interface: FCGI) is great. Modperl is great but you need root or an amazingly permissive webhost to run it. FastCGI is generally as fast as modperl but not as complex to work with. Many hosts are running it now, largely because of Rails. Catalyst supports CGI, modperl, FastCGI and more for its server engine. It's got a learning curve but a lot of out of the box components for DBs and UI are complete and stable.

Lastly, anything positive you hear about PHP, well, try some rock salt.

update: eliminated an extra "s."