In my experience the best practice projects are games. Here are some simple examples:
- Tune sports cars and race them
- Manage a sports team and compete vs other teams
- Setup an army and fight vs another army
Stuff like that. It's just that games raise a lot of questions and usually require more creativity than copying functionality like making a simple bb script.
But if you want an idea like that instead, a good example is to try and copy librarything.com or to make a simplified version of deviantart.com