Some parts of the generated projects might not work with versions of Boost older than CVS HEAD.
To use the project created by the sandbox template fully, you will need a few things.
First of all, you should familiarize yourself with Boost. A good starting point for this is the getting started page. In particular, make sure you have installed a recent version of Boost, and have a working bjam executable.
Second, you will need to download some additional tools to build the documentation. Instructions for this part can be found in the Boostbook documentation and the Quickbook documentation. The projects generated by file_template rely on xsltproc, DocBook XSL and DTD distributions, and (optionally) Doxygen. The sandbox template does not currently use Apache FOP.
Make sure you download docbook-xsl and not docbook5-xsl.
Also, you will need access to the sandbox in the Boost subversion. Follow the directions in the Boost subversion wiki.
Finally, you will need a python interpreter. if you don't have one already. FileTemplate is compatibile with python version 2.3, but the sandbox template Xcode and MSVC IDE project generators require the UUID module which started shipping only with version 2.5 (although it works with 2.3).
Once you have all this in place, you can go to the template-under-construction folder of the sandbox, and try the FileTemplate script. The sandbox use cases section provides some common examples.