With the help and patience of wfsp, Anno and others on the CB, I was able to trim out some fat in my existing dispatch tables for a site I'm rewriting.

What I'm currently left with (which works, so far), is this:

 my %dispatch = (
        home            => \&home,
        donate          => \&donate,
        news            => \&news,
        samp            => sub { \&samples($dbh) },
        ...
);

$action         = $apr->param('a') || 'home';
$dispatch{$action}->($action);

sub render_template {
        my ($action, $params) = @_; 
 
        my $template    = HTML::Template->new(
                                die_on_bad_params => '0',
                                filename => "$action");
        my $content     = $template->output;
        print $content;
}

sub home {
        my ($action, $params) = @_;
        return render_template($action, $params);
}

sub donate {
        my ($action, $params) = @_;
        return render_template($action, $params);
}

sub news {
        my ($action, $params) = @_;
        return render_template($action, $params);
}

sub samples {

        my ($dbh) = shift;
        ....
}
[download]

Note: There's one small bug I just found when composing this (if I pass an unknown param, it should default to 'home', but it doesn't, it just dies with Can't use string ("") as a subroutine ref while "strict refs" in use). I'll try to fix that shortly.

What I'm wondering now, is with these subs being identical now except for their sub name... can I make these into anonymous subs, and pass the $action down to them, reducing the 20+ identical subs down to 1?