I just committed some stuff in PluginManager to actually load the Gem- based plugins from the manifest. Merb::PluginManager.load_plugins is what goes in merb_init to load them all. For every plugin in the manifest, ''theplugin'' is required, and then we try and require ''theplugin/merb_init'' and, if that fails, we try ''plugin/init'' I''ll be working on this some more this week and next, to make sure it works as expected. I''ll also write some docs.