David Johnson pointed out BasicPortal sometime between when I went to bed and when I woke up:
The goal of this project is to leverage a combination of several of the Apache Foundation’s Jakarta projects into a simple vertical sample application that contains the functionality common to 80% of web projects — we let developers customize the last 20%.
The BasicPortal project should allow high developer productivity (of several modules per day per developer) and be KISS; simple to teach and be comprised accepted of good practices (best practices).