I'm not very good with OO terminology so I am not going to try to explain. However, under normal circustances, one will not do "use CGI qw(:standard);" and "my $q = new CGI;" at the same time. Both provide you with an interface for accessing CGI parameters, but go about it a little differently. With the example you have above, you could do this:

use CGI;
my $q = new CGI;
my $value = $q->param ('ord_id');
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The param function assciated with the CGI object $q returns the value of the parameter passed to the script, so now $value contains whatever the order id was. The following does the same thing:

use CGI qw (:standard);
my $value = param ('ord_id');
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Except this time, param is no longer associated with an object and can be treated like any regular sub. Hope that helps at least a bit.

Zenon Zabinski | zdog | zdog@perlmonk.org