If you intend to create .par archives from lots of CPAN distributions, I suggest you have a look at the PAR::Dist::FromCPAN module and the cpan2par tool accompanying it. It started out as a quick and dirty tool I used for testing PAR::Repository, but it should be quite usable now. Theoretically, it can even follow arbitrary CPAN dependencies. One exception are modules using Module::AutoInstall which break the CPAN.pm dependency checking itself. (Read: They're broken.)

In fact, your use case kind of sounds like you could have a look at PAR::Repository / PAR::Repository::Client, too. Just keep in mind that PAR::Repository (the administrative interface which can inject new .par's into the repository) doesn't run on win32 because it needs symlinks.

The basic use case of PAR::Repositories on the client side is as follows:

use strict; use warnings;

use PAR { repository => 'file:///path/to/repository/on/nfs/' };
# or:
# use PAR { repository => 'http://repository/url' };

use Foo;
# Foo loaded from the repository if not found locally.
[download]

For finer-grained control, you can eschew the interface using PAR and create your PAR::Repository::Client by hand. That way, you can use it to locally install and update the distributions instead of fetching them from the repository, etc.

On a side note: you can embed arbitrary data files (i.e. CSS/HTML) into a .par and have them extracted when the .par is loaded. You would find them in the $ENV{PAR_TEMP} directory or so. (The PAR::Environment POD has the details on all the environment variables PAR uses. If in doubt, test.)

In the hope this helps,
Steffen