Almost two years ago I wrote a post called ‘Magento local.xml Boilerplate’ on the Magento Fox blog. It was quite a popular post and came in useful for the Magento developers at Creare. I have made a couple of minor updates, but the general gist of the whole file is exactly the same.
It is designed to save you a bit of time coding XML that you would need to write on a regular basis. I have removed the contact page section as appropriate meta data was added by default to 1.7.
As usual, if you have any comments or suggestions please let me know!