Re: having difficulty getting $self back from an _init() function

[Fastolfe]

In your init function, you are changing $self, creating a new hash reference. This destroys the associations it's had before. If you want to add some items to $self, set them individually:

sub _init {
   ...
   $self->{modules} = { %registry };
   $self->{site}    = $regattrs{site};
   ...
}