XML Newbie Question

Im currently have a bunch of documents that are all built in the same format ie(title,file number,body,date created,...etc).
What I was wondering was if this information could all be put into an xml document. So that the XML document was the central repositary for the web site.I have looked into XML and have worked with XML and XSLT but from what i learned at the W3schools web site templates must be applied to documents and ideally i would like to do the reverse so that when new documents are created and need to be added to the web site all i would need to do is take a copy of the template rename it slightly modifiy it and have the new web page. The reason i would like to do it this way is because the websites main page is basically an index the index contains the documents title date it was created and filenumber , from that index we then link to the whole document which contains all this info again. so to reduce duplication this is why i would like to have one xml doc for the web site.
Any ideas for solutions would be much appreciated
Thanks
Jerry