Building and managing web sites with the Template Toolkit

This paper addresses some of the issues involved in developing and maintaining web sire content and web-based applications. Ii identifies some common problems encountered and presents some basic requirements for flexible content generation. It demonstrates the technique of using text-based template files to generate dynamic HTML and introduces the Template Toolkit, a set of Perl modules available from CPAN [1] ideally suited for this purpose. A number of worked examples are presented which illustrate various features of the Template Toolkit. These demonstrate the construction of both static: and dynamic HTML pages using the standard toolkit utilities, custom CGI scripts, and Apache/mod perl handlers. The use of standard plugin modules is included to demonstrate integration with CGI [2], XML [3], and DBI [4], and methods for extending the Template Toolkit bit binding to external data and user-defined code are also covered. The closing sections present an analysis of performance and a critique of the markup language syntax with regard to the inherent tradeoff between simplicity and flexibility. The paper concludes by stressing the importance of adopting a suitable structure and methodology for building a web site, in addition to using the right tools for the job.