some small things would make the current configuration mechanism a little bit easier to handle:

• cascade magnolia.properties files (define only changed values)
• use system porperties if passed (overwrite magnolia.properties values)
• replace all ${property} in log4j.xml and repositories.xml
• introduce magnolia.server, magnolia.webapp, magnolia.repositories.home, magnolia.repositories.jackrabbit.configFile

Doing this we can avoid doublicated files by having multiple configurations in one jar. It is obsolete to change the config files (for bindName or similar) if you run multiple magnolias in on container.