Gianugo gives us 8 simple rules for building a manageable Cocoon application. These are very pragmatic rules that every Cocoon user should know and use. But out of these 8 rules, 3 will become obsolete in the upcoming 2.2 version of Cocoon:

• rule 1 (excluding blocks): with Cocoon 2.2, each block will be defined by a jar file and a dedicated xconf file, the global system configuration being built by including all these xconf snippets. Adding/removing a block to an existing Cocoon installation will then simply be a matter of copying/deleting two files.
  
• rule 2 (tweak the configuration using the xconf task): using the same configuration include mechanism, adding your own project-specific configurations will simply be done by adding a xconf file in the "WEB-INF/xconf" directory where it will automatically be picked up.
  
• rule 5 (Cocoon Forms resources): all resources needed by Cocoon Forms (js libraries, htmlarea, etc) are now in the jar file and accessed using the "resource:" protocol. The XSLs aren't there yet, but this is something we're likely to do also.

Cocoon 2.1 brought Flowscript and Cocoon Forms, and also many new specialized blocks that made the single global configuration file close to unmanageable and frightening to many people. Learning from this, Cocoon 2.2 will have a brand new configuration system that will ease the building of your own Cocoon, suited to your real application needs.