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Naish, these sound like good ideas to me!
"Well, I am working on an article module that will support any kind of key/value pairs that you would want to attach to it."
In my view it would be better to try and integrate this in the core, rather than create a new module, then is could re reused. Talk to Ackbarr, who is doing somehing re custom fields in the user end...
"Furthermore on of our other developers are working on a module to make the creation of static pages a snap. Think EZCMS (postnuke module) on steroids."
With smarty should be quite doable, no? Of course you need to think wht can and can't be static...
Go to it!