Org-beamer problems

[Bill Moran <bill1moran@gmail.com>]

I've been trying to follow the various tutorials on the web 
to do beamer in org-mode. I've used beamer, latex and emacs 
for many years but am finding that none of the examples on 
the web work totally s intended in my attempts to use
org-mode with beamer. 

I have copied verbatim several examples such as from here:

http://orgmode.org/worg/org-tutorials/org-beamer/tutorial.html#sec-4_1

When I run  them I get the following problems - plus others 
I will go into later if necessary:

1. The title page does not have a title - just the date. 
When I check the latex file created from the org file I 
notice that a \maketitle command occurs outside a frame environment 
- whereas in beamer I normally use \titlepage inside a frame
environment to create the titlepage. 

2. \alert command does not work - even with the additions to .emacs 
suggested here:
 http://www.mail-archive.com/emacs-orgmode@gnu.org/msg21507.html
(And there are no errors in running the .emacs file) 
Always the @ symbol appears in the latex created from org as @. 

I wonder whether there is some configuration I am missing. 
Other aspects of the slides are normal - bullets and 
frametitles specifically.