Open Source LaTeX environment for educational books?

Fully aware of the LaTeX features to define new environment allowing me to do about anything, I was wondering if there are Open Source packages that allows me to do book branding by predefining environments for examples, excursions, listings, question sections, etc. For example, have an example environment with a blue-ish background, sections with further details which can be skipped by the casual reader in yellow, etc.

Today, I have been playing a bit with the float package, and customized the .sty to have a environment with a blue background, but did not manage to tune the macro's such to have change the font style to sans-serif.

Now, this is just an example, but I figured that many people must have been doing this to give their book a somewhat more professional look. Are there LaTeX package around that allow me to focus on the content, instead spending time on LaTeX coding to make environments stand out from the main text?

Is there a document class that allows me to just do:

\documentclass{fancyeducationalbook}

\begin{document}

\begin[bgcolor=orange]{fancyExampleEnvironment}
   % showing up in the PDF with a orange background
\end{fancyExampleEnvironment}

\end{document}

It does not have to be perfect at all, but it does need to make various boxes stand out, and immediately be recognizable for first-year students as having some purpose (example, further reading, definition, etc); The key is that it makes the book look attractive.

I do not mind some hacking, but a good basis would be nice. Very much preferred, this base would be Open Source, so that I can reshare my customizations, if any needed.

Update: I'd welcome a system which supports multipage environments.

Solution

I did ask a similar question a few weeks ago:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1783400/developing-ebooks-software

where a couple of responses mentioned some other tools and packages.

Obviously LaTeX has the book style and those sorts of things, but one must remember it's primarily a scientific document producing tool - which it's fantastic for, but for other tasks there are often tools more suited to the job:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPUB - the e-book publishing standard
http://code.google.com/p/sigil/ - a free GNUv3 editor for edocs
http://www.lulu.com/ - a fully integrated publishing toolset - for creating, editing and selling ebooks (if you want to go that far) - although this one's not open source of course...

Good luck, let us know what you find if you spot anything else - I'm still on the hunt for the 'ideal' tool :)