I'm using a big stack of Newsflash modules in User 5 and User 6 to organize our front page content. There are actually no front page stories showing. That's mod_flashrotator rolling our feature stories in User 3. Most of our ads are served via a local installation of OpenAds (parsed by mod_kl_eval_php).
From the main menu, there's a page called @Ma.gnolia. This is the output of our Ma.gnolia bookmark group, parsed by the tableless version of kl_rssfeed.
We're using Fiji's Tagbot for social bookmarking, Jom Comment, the AllVideos plugin, the mosgoogle mambot, and Artio JoomSEF. Since Joomla's default RSS only recognizes front page content -- and there isn't any -- our feeds are generated (for now) by DS-Syndicate, washed through Feedburner.
The site, as it stands today, is similar in shape to our previous template. I'll be adding a right sidebar on the content pages fairly soon. Still lots to do getting it prettied up with the available module class suffixes.
No, other than adjusting the height of the Control Panel drawer -- which was nicely documented in the demo -- that's stock. I tinkered with the CSS to give the banner position a bit more breathing room. This has to be done cautiously, because it's easy to throw off the menu alignment. But it works.
One thing I changed was the position of the Readon graphic. It's flush left out of the box. I use 70 x 70 pixel icons on the left side of my story teasers, so having the Readon there made things look lopsided. A float-right value to the Readon in template_css. css does the trick.
I liked the old look, too -- but we really need a right sidebar on the content pages to narrow the main text area and make for easier reading. We'll be implementing this next week.