The Beta will be released soon, within the next week or so.
Read this announcement, contains some info about the beta as well as new changes.
http://vince.dynalias.com/blog/viewtopic.php?t=42
Ein: My configuration table is just in a simple format, config_name, and config_value (just like the phpbb configuration table). As for the other tables, there's a table for weblogs, table for entries, and a table for replies. Each with a foreign key linking them. You probably won't need to
"mod my mod". If you want to include part of the system, you can just create a blog for that user (it's one blog per user), and then in your portal you can pull out the data for just that blog (i.e., get entries with a specific weblog_id). You could also add contributors to it too. That would most certainly take care of most of the work you need for the blog module.
