The reason I wanted to use SSI is because I know no other way of doing this. I am creating a huge admin site to control the content of another site and the only way I could think of doing this is via SSI for the cookie checking. THis is the first time I have ever tried to make a "member's only" type area. I have looked at HTML::Template but I just don't see how it would work in my case. I guess this project is beyond my abilites and I will have to scrap it. I just can't figure out a good way of protecting LOTS of HTML pages behind a login setup.
Are you using Apache? If so, try googling for htpasswd. This is a way to protect directories of html files using "basic authentication". You'll just need to develop a way of putting approved users (and passwords) into the .htpasswd file.