The current status of xcms is as follows: the built-in theme is almost finished and duplicated into a default theme, which will serve as a demonstration for standardized theme programming for xcms 1.0. The MySQL version of XDAL has a finished database design and now needs some work on its API to index.php. I think the administration is not so cruel if you use phpMyAdmin (o;.
With the release of xcms 0.2, the documentation will be the first example of a working xcms environment in use of the XDAL-MySQL library.
xcms 0.2 (and it's logo) should be out next week if I'm not too lazy.