I realize that ideas of this sort crop up here several times per month, and I''ve even tossed out my thoughts a time or two. What I''m trying to do this time, though, is to offer my ideas on how the task might be accomplished, then to start a separate project such that any future inquiries can be sent its way. :) I have some of these thoughts on the wiki, but it certainly can''t hurt to send some here as well. :) In designing various Rails applications, I find myself copying bits of code or code modifications from one to another. Similarly, there''s lots of duplication of effort going on. If one of Rails'' philosophies is to not repeat yourself, then why are lots of us rewriting changes to the login generator or creating ACL support for our sites? :) Similarly, even if it *is* easy to write a forum from scratch, why does that mean we *should*? Yes, it''s easy to cook up a quick meal, yet there are restaurants which are eager to do it for us should we, for whatever reason, not want to. I like the starter kit idea in theory, but not in practice. As I interpreted it (which could very well be wrong) the kits were almost separate applications. Instead of designing a forum, a shopping cart, a weblog system each with different authentication schemas and mechanisms, why not add extra functionality to the login generator, write an ACL generator, then create a series of higher-level generators that use the same schemas as the lower-level ones? Your one site might consist of several components--a weblog controller for news, a forum, shopping cart, bugtracker, perhaps a simplified CMS for database-backed pages and files . . . Products like Plone seem to me like large, out-of-the-box websites, but often I find myself wanting to whack features off of a full Plone install, to simplify it for my needs. I''m not proposing that. Instead, I propose a system in which the application is generated normally, gems for various generators are installed, then the developer begins generating/integrating components. If you don''t need users to have their own homepage then simply don''t generate that component. If you''re designing a community site for an organization then you''d simply generate a forum system and weblog, then work on integrating those in whatever way makes sense (perhaps the frontpage weblog uses some of the same models/schemas as the forum component, and news items on the frontpage could be taken from posts in the news forum.) If you''re developing a site for a software company then generate a shopping cart and a weblog for news. It isn''t a full-fledged CMS, just a series of well-designed and easily-integrable components that can either stand on their own or work together. I thought of calling these components boxcars, though my ideas a few weeks ago involved a packaging system as well. This aspect can probably be eliminated with gems and some site-wide mechanism for installing new generators, which IIRC is in 0.96? Anyone interested in not just *talking* about a project like this, but in actually *doing* it? I don''t have as much design experience as I''d *like* to pull something like this off, but I''ll definitely help with coding/design should others be interested in joining.