I ran across this site the other day when I was looking at overhauling my .emacs file since I'm only an occasional emacs user these days. This guy has a great starter repo of his customized .emacs.d directory that takes care of a lot of the setup work to use all the customizations and modes he's using: https://github.com/magnars/.emacs.d

One note, if you do clone the repo, make sure to use the --recursive option (as the readme instructs) since there are a bunch of other git repositories imported in the repo.