FastTemplate vs. Modules?

I am a real beginner.

What I am trying to do is build a navigation for my website that I can use throughout the entire site. The navigation should change to display different information depending on what section of the site you are in. It has to be a "smart navigation". For example, it might display particular subnav options for "Schools" when you are in the "Schools" section (/about/schools).

I am trying to use FastTemplate to accomplish this and I have only so far been successful in including the nav sitewide (and not having any broken links!!). But since the FT template is not parsed by the server, I can not include any conditional logic in the navigation to make it display different data.

Am I using the wrong tool to do this? Should I be learning how to make a "navigation module" instead of tinkering with FT?

Thanks!

Well, you will certainly need some sort of server side solution. Probably the best way for you to do this is to use ssi in this case as it is available on all hosts and quite easy to learn. That's if you don't want or can't spend time learning real server side languages such as perl, jsp or php.