Note: The Storm modules for Drupal 7 and beyond have been renamed to Project Management, and moved to http://drupal.org/project/pm. This project has been replaced with Storm distribution
Duplicate/copy an existing role with the same permissions for Access Control and taxonomies, if exist taxonomy access control module, as the original ones.
More preprocess hooks for manipulating template variables. Drupal 6 only provides one. Hexagon adds two more. pre_preprocess invoked before the default preprocess function and re_process which runs after.
Granular separation of support files for better management of code. Template variable processors or "preprocess" functions can be grouped into files based on the module that originally implements the template. For example, variable processors for the template "user-profile.tpl.php" and "user-profile-category.tpl.php" can be placed in "user.common-vars.inc" ("user.theme.inc" in versions 1.5 and above for theme functions and variable processors.). It can also be very granular by naming them based on the template name itself, "user-profile-category.vars.inc".
Plug-ins for commonly used functionality across multiple themes. This is where snippets specific to theming become obsolete. Once a plug-in is created, all you need to do is enable them in your theme's .info file. Common functionality can be shared and specific components can be overridden for individual themes.