The templates feature ("start every Rails project with a default stack") is a godsend to folks who routinely start new projects, such as freelancers with quick turn around times or internal IT folks who crank out mini-applications.
I do a bunch of little utility projects for work (e.g. "Report X was previously generated based on five Excel files which had to be manually synched and executed, now the information is in one place on the intranet and updated every night via a cron job.") When you have a project which takes under a man-week a significant portion of the time is "Oh bloody heck I didn't install the auto-complete gem", "Oh bloody heck I forgot I'd need Google charts again.", "Oh bloody heck where did I put that syntax highlighter plugin", etc.
This lets me spend less time fighting Rails configuration and more time fighting Java XML configuration, like God intended.
First of all kudos to all Rails contributors, this seems like a great release.
I agree the template feature is great, though at the moment not surprisingly a bit immature (template_runner.rb changed a lot in the last month, we'll see were it goes from here). I've been working on a template for a few days now (which will provide out of the box authentication with authlogic and sensible defaults for most things we usually use, like I18n, application wide settings, ubiquitous gems and plugins, SCM setup). I can see this feature saving us a lot of time on smallish projects.
I have about 15 that I keep coming back to. Most deal with boring business requirements: charting (I use two different variants of Ruby wrappers for the Google Charts API, plus OpenFlashChart 2), data entry, parsing, etc. I have no clue where they're hosted since I use Google as my own personal link memory service.
I do a bunch of little utility projects for work (e.g. "Report X was previously generated based on five Excel files which had to be manually synched and executed, now the information is in one place on the intranet and updated every night via a cron job.") When you have a project which takes under a man-week a significant portion of the time is "Oh bloody heck I didn't install the auto-complete gem", "Oh bloody heck I forgot I'd need Google charts again.", "Oh bloody heck where did I put that syntax highlighter plugin", etc.
This lets me spend less time fighting Rails configuration and more time fighting Java XML configuration, like God intended.