Alex,
The template parser, while more limited, admittedly, can do much of what the basic php and ssi includes would do. You can increase this with the <%call::to::module::sub%>.
Depending on what the php is doing, <%...%> tags might do as well, and it's all perl.
This is something that should really be explored in depth in the new docs.
I've got some templates that are pretty complex now, and display pretty quickly -- at least as quickly as back-end process.
In fact, I have one template in the MultiUp mod, that is now doing the work of 4 (?) different ones, depending on what is passed to it, or what the template finds once stuff is passed to it. It's all pretty cool.
I'm not running this under mod_perl, but I'll bet if I was, it would be really close to php or emb_perl functionality -- maybe more, since it's a bit higher-level in calling conventions.
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