We were quite silent here at nood.org for a wile. But the work didn't stop. Recently we had our base theme called "noodle" completely rewritten. It is now open source so you can get a copy (currently in beta) at github: http://github.com/betarobot/noodle

UPDATE: you can download the theme directly from now on at http://drupal.org/project/noodle

Just a few words about the theme. The previous code base was used to power dozens of custom drupal themes made by us for over 4 years. The new codebase is much cleaner and more modular.

Noodle theme is targeted primarily for developers and themers. The theme was developed to allow rapid creation of custom (sub)themes. It includes basic styles, typography and features which I found to be useful on majority of projects over years: from less complicated blogs to more complex corporate sites. Compared to many existing Drupal theme frameworks it works right away, it is lightweight, there are no zillion of settings to obey. Actually, I believe the majority of theme setting should be hardcoded anyway not to allow final user to ruin the original design.

I'll keep away from describing all the them features but here are a few:

• 19 block regions (you can disable them in subtheme.info file)
• accordion block region in the sidebar (nice to crop less used content)
• meerkat block region at the bottom (http://meerkat.jarodtaylor.com/)
• block region in node
• on mouse over block edit badges at any place
• nicely styled comments
• compact comment forms
• foldable comment forms to save screen space
• nice forums

More info will come soon.