I use HTML::Template because its simple and fast and easy for designers to understand. I think the key about doing templates is rather than think of them as code that controls your formatting, think of them as a formatted page where you can control the content.

To help you along here's a simple example that could be used for your wine website

my @rows = (); # H::T can create a looping structure out of
               # an array of hashes
               # the keys for each hash are the variable
               # names for each row of the loop

# add database stuff here
while(my $ref = $sth->fetchrow_hashref()) {
     # you can mangle whats in ref, I often
     # just push the ref onto the array and try to
     # put my already mangled stuff in the database
     # This only works though if the variable names in
     # the template are the same as your DB column names
     push(@rows,$ref);
}

my $template = HTML::Template->new(filename=>'/path/to/some.tmpl');
# H::T expects a reference to the array
$template->param(wines=>\@rows);

# print your header (CGI or CGI::Simple is still useful for this)
print $cgi->header();

# and then your H::T output
print $template->output();
[download]

Then in your template file, assuming you have wine_name, bottles and country ... it might look something like this:

<table cellspacing="3" cellpadding="3" border="1">
<tr>
    <td><b>Wine</b></td>
    <td><b>Country</b></td>
    <td><b>Bottles</b></td>
</tr>
<tmpl_loop name=wines>
  <tr>
    <td><tmpl_var name=wine_name></td>
    <td><tmpl_var name=country></td>
    <td><tmpl_var name=bottles></td>
  </tr>
</tmpl_loop>
</table>
[download]

Your Perl code will add a new row for each element in your @rows array with each of the variable names as <td> areas. There's tons of other stuff useful for doing things like changing the background color for every other row, etc. Have a look at the loop_context_vars option in the H::T docs for that.

I hope that gives you an idea of how to do it.

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