GUI Changes - Web Parts/Modular Screen Parts?

[Syd Thrift]

So, in my real-life job I'm an admin for a piece of software called SharePoint, and one of the things that I enjoy about this is that when users set up a site, they have a big load of widgets called web parts (actually, this is more of an ASP.NET thing than an exclusive SharePoint thing, but they're probably implemented best in SP) which they can deploy to personalize sites for their own use. A web part eats up only a corner or part of a web page so that you can have several on the same page which utilize this information.

In a nutshell, it would be really cool to see OOTP to deploy similar functionality. It's kind of what is done on the in-game screen, only expandable to either the entire game or at least personalized pages. Imagine a page with the toolbar on the left side along with some bookmarks you can click directly to, a standings page, today's scores, and tomorrow's matchups in the center, and then on the left margin a quick listing of your current lineup, pitching rotation, and bullpen? And if you are, for instance, running a deadball era league and don't need to see the bullpen, you can simply remove the bullpen web part and replace it with a BA league leaders web part so that you can quickly track whether or not your stud 2B is going to win the Chalmers Award this year?

Obviously you all wouldn't be able to leverage SharePoint directly to do this; it's just plain too expensive. However, it shouldn't be *that* hard to set up an application page with zones on it which you could then plop these web parts into. And, depending on how available you make the underlying DBs (they actually use SQL, right?), possibly folks could create their own and drastically improve the moddability of the game...

I'm trying in vain to find a site online that a. has enough web parts implemented that you can see what I'm talking about but b. isn't so heavily reskinned that it's not easy to see exactly what you're looking at. I'll see if maybe I can cook something up at home.