Howdy,
well I did the XML decision end of last year and since I only needed static HTML pages I wrote a little perl program (which you can find here if you are interested) that takes a whole XML tree, builds one large XML document from that and pushes it thru an XSLT stylesheet.

OK, adding new pages and auto-link them is very easy now (hmm, from the XML point of view, only: as a matter of fact my sysad has disabled ftp in our firewalls so I don't have to bear with our pages right now :-).
Changing the layout only involves _one_ document: the stylesheet. But that is really ugly. I have been cursing XSLT for weeks!

Another problem of _that_ time was that the XML::XSL perl modules were not complete. I dunno of the current situation (though I'd really like to put that into my script -> any volunteers? ;-). So I used saxon (which is written in Java which is just incredibly slow on my home machine).

A good source for me has been at zvon.org with loads of examples for XML, XSL, XSLT, CSS, Perl, ....

Regards...

Stefan