I am new to node.js but am excited to try it out. I am using Express as a web framework, and Jade as a template engine. Both were easy to get setup following this tutorial from
Express authentication using Redis for session store and Couchdb for database using coffeescript..
Check this gist: https://gist.github.com/652819
I use this template for most of my projects. You can implement a similar mongodb version of it too using:
node-mongodb-native by christkv : https://github.com/christkv/node-mongodb-native, or
mongoose : https://github.com/learnboost/mongoose, or
amark's mongous: https://github.com/amark/mongous