Installing Drupal

Drupal was working fine, now it just gives me a blank page.

"html body /body /html"

thats all it puts out. the greater/lesser than symbols where there, had to removed to post.

php 4.3.3
Drupal 4.3

www.aapifordean.com is a deanspace site based on drupal which has been having intermittent problems for teh past four or five days. It pulls up blank web browsers on the index request, but serves direct requests for static content fine, as well as phpinfo. You can see here->
http://www.aapifordean.com/phpinfo.php

wget returns this:

wget http://www.aapifordean.com
--01:47:22-- http://www.aapifordean.com/
=> `index.html'
Resolving www.aapifordean.com... done.
Connecting to www.aapifordean.com[12.129.229.198]:80... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response...
01:47:22 ERROR -1: No data received.

This is the error in error.php ->

warning: main(http://www.aapifordean.com/index.php): failed to open stream: HTTP request failed! in /home/aapiford/public_html/error.php on line 19.

The strange thing is that if you request static pages directly, or the phpinfo page, over and over eventually the main site will start to work. I can even get into the admin section, where more wierdness resides:

Seom pages the menu does not appear, other pages it does. The site monitroing page shows the menu, but the indivdual error message views do not. The site configuration screen does not show the menu, so I can't configure modules.

I had the web host check the server and they say it is fully operational. I can still ftp in and all that so...

Anyway, would really appreciatte some help...

I think I have tried everything but I can't seem to get the navigation menu toshow on any pages. I have added and removed the Syndicate and whos online block but the Navigation menu is not responding. I hope I am using the right terminology but what I want is a home button and I also created a static pagethat I was hoping would link to the menu. I did a clean install of thelatest version 4.3

I'm considering using drupal for an extranet site. Broadly, content falls into three categories:

public -- this information can be viewed by anyone (anonymous users).
shared -- this information is available to employees and privileged external users.
private -- this information is only available to people in the employee role.

Can I use the 'user roles' stuff to hide/show/make read-only content on a node-by-node basis? For example, a public user shouldn't be able to see any pages marked as private.

I'm not sure if this has been discussed before, but I'm unable to find much using search. Effectively, how does the filter system work?

From what I gather, the _filter hook is an on-the-fly filter. Good for little things, but for anything complex this would eat up CPU.

The _nodeapi hook seems to be able to do on-submit filtering, or at least that's what seems to have been suggested. My question is, how does this work? When I use the textile filter, which uses this method, I can edit the filtered pages and find they are still in textile format.

We are still in the stage of selection of opens ource CMS. We would need the website developed/configured/tested using Drupal 4.3 by developers in another country (Russia) and, once completed, ported to US co-location. (It is not an option for developers to work remotely with Drupal instance hosted in US).

Would greatly appreciate if somebody can explain portability issues for a website powered with Drupal 4.3 with hacked themes, customized modules and loaded with content - this issue is critical in our selection of CMS.