Post installation

I've set up some private groups, added members, created some posts which are exclusive to the group (i.e. public was not checked).

Log in with an username which is a member of the group and everything looks fine. Log in as a user who is not member of the group and things initially look fine (e.g. I can't see the group (it's set to not appear in lists) or the private posts).

I am a reasonably Drupal savvy project leader (read: I don't do php) and I am looking for a module that will allow me to administer content in a more user friendly way than the administer->content page. Particularly I'd like to be able to create menu items that a user can click on that will list specific types of content by either type or taxonomy. For example I have a collection of Event nodes (definied with CCK), I want the user to click on a menu item and be brought to a list of all of those Event Nodes, and be able to view, edit or delete them (much like administer->content).

What is xmlrpc.php file used for?

I have searched both Drupal.org and Google to find out what the xmlrpc.php file used for? The only thing I can find is the following statement:

"PHP page for handling incoming XML-RPC requests from clients."

I have removed the xmlrpc.php from my site but I have numerous RSS feeds coming into my site. Is the xmlrpc.php file used for RSS feeds? Should I put the file back?

A couple of my modules, particularly the gallery2 integration module, are throwing a ton of errors my way. For example, if I upload an album, I'll get an error -- though the album and images are uploading and appearing fine. Here's an example of the recurring error:

warning: is_readable() [function.is-readable]: open_basedir restriction in effect. File(/usr/share/pear/plugins/compiler.html_select_date.php) is not within the allowed path(s): (/var/www/vhosts/mydomain.com/httpdocs:/tmp) in /..../httpdocs/gallery2/lib/smarty/internals/core.get_include_path.php on line 34.

Making the upgrade to Drupal 5; I'm hitting some bumps, and scrambling over most.

But this is wacky. I have two sites running off of one installation, and both sites' module admin pages report that the Taxonomy and Menu modules are missing! Not disabled, actually missing. And sure enough, the related functionality – like the ability to work with menus – is MIA.

The modules are absolutely, certainly sitting where they should be.

Troubleshooting:

a) Downloaded fresh 5.0, replaced existing Menu and Taxonomy modules with new copies. No change.

I am able to add a text field in a custom content type, but I want that text field to be as big, and expandable as the body text field in a regular node. I only get that one line. I need a "textarea". I have cheched 'filtered input', so that's not the problem.

Any ideas ?