This is one shortcoming with our docbook stuff right now. You either generate everything or nothing (AFAIK, I may be wrong).
The &version; thing was something I added in the toplevel index.xml, so that we could easily change the version that is displayed in all generated pages.
Your stylesheets should work, but they won't generate the HTML with the Alex logo and stuff. If you want that, you have to use our openacs.xsl that is in packages/acs-core-docs/www/xml.
I'm having trouble updating my CVS checkout right now, but I know Vinod added a Makefile that you can just do "make html" or something like that.