[plug] seeking perl wisdom

[sol]

Okay, okay, so I'm caving into peer group pressure. I've decided to 
learn Perl with an eye to learning web application development. As it 
can be quite time consuming to learn a language, and because there's 
HEAPS to learn within the domain of Perl (I've already spent quite a 
while browsing the web and reading online docs) I was seeking some 
wisdom from Perl sages (ie: people who use Perl regularly and for some 
time) to give some advice on where I should focus my efforts.

My (hypothetical) question is:

If you were going to develop a web site from scratch - knowing what you 
know now - that would require a high degree of dynamic content, and were 
going to process online transactions (including credit card and cheque 
order) using a RDB like Postgresql, what method of development would you 
favour?

some options: 1) plain old CGI.pm
                        2) HTML::Mason
                        3) HTML::Template
                        4) Bricolage
                        5) others?

I'm assuming that it's worth learning something about mod_perl 
regardless of which method is employed?

Any other tips or traps to look out for for the unwary?

regards,

sol