So you want to combine the power of Awesome WM with the convenience of the a full desktop environment?
I wanted to replace xfwm4 (the window manager of Xfce) with Awesome and could not find anything working on the web. But this little line of bash does the trick:
$ killall xfwm4 && awesome
It works better than I expected and integrates really well into Xfce.
Have a nice day.