At Ingeniweb, we have started to define standards for our Plone projects using ZopeSkel. IngeniSkel is a thin layer on the top of ZopeSkel, that was:
- injecting Archetype content within existing products - defining standard tests skeletons for all elements contained in products. - providing other templates like the recipe one, that creates a skeleton for zc.buildout recipes

The injection idea was previously proposed by Martin, and Mustapha started to implement it in a branch. Erik F. has added the archetype content injection yesterday.

It means you can now inject new archetype based content with the Paster directly with ZopeSkel:

$ paster create -t archetype my.package $ cd my.package  $ paster --help

usage: paster [paster_options] COMMAND [command_options]

options:

  ...

Commands:

  create       Create the file layout for a Python distribution

  ...

ZopeSkel local commands:

  addcontent   Adds plone content types to your project  $ paster addcontent --list

Available templates:

  contenttype:  A content type skeleton

  portlet:      A Plone 3 portlet

  view:         A browser view skeleton

  zcmlmeta:     A ZCML meta directive skeleton $ paster addcontent

This is great, now the only thing it misses so we can drop IngeniSkel in favor of this enhanced version of ZopeSkel is generating tests modules on all templates and local commands, and the same way everytime. I started such a work in another branch to backport what we have it and I will propose it.

Why ? Because having tests that are written the same way on all layers of a Plone project is important to:
- automate some QA and documentation tasks - make sure a newcomer won't get lost on how to startup a new piece of code, with the right test fixture. If he takes too much time to prepare the test fixture, he'll probably drop the TDD approach...

Edit: I have merged the the recipe template into ZopeSkel trunk already, as I've been asked to