Post installation

I'm trying to get a couple of modules installed and everything seems pretty straightforward, except the part where I am directed to go to administer to change a few things. For exapmple I installed the adsense module and up to the point where it says " Go to administer -> settings -> profile and create a new profile field of type "single line textfield"."

I really don't see the "profile" option anywhere on this page as there's general settings, cache handling, etc.

After failed attempts at RTFM'ing, banging my head over this...

I guess rather than give the whole long story on everything I've tried, I'll list my objective. I'm very, very new to drupal, so let me offer that disclaimer as well.

SO...

I'm basically trying to get my drupal site laid out in a manner similar to slashdot (slashdot.org rather). Not aesthetically, just navigationally.

For example, I might have primary links of: IT, General, Linux, Windows, Apple

if you look at slashdot, you'll notice the day's top stories are promoted to its front page.
however, if you click say...Apple...it lists numerous stories related to apple.

Within the drupal framework, how would one add content in such a manner? Say i have a page for "Apple". I have a primary link called "Mac" pointing to that page. If I do create content ~> story, and set the story's parent container to be Primary Links~>Mac...it disappears into never-never land. What i *want*, is for it to appear atop the "Apple" page, and to basically be able to say "make this story, and show it and any previous Apple stories, whenever i click on the 'Apple' primary link".

In the same way as slashdot, whereby when you go to the main page, you see the day's stories....but when you click on a particular category, such as Apple, you're presented with a list of story snippets...not just one static page. As it is now, I have one static page, and although I've created a new page with a parent container of the relevant primary link, it only shows me that one static page that the primary link points at.

We've just started using the signup module in combination with the event module, for online event registration. It's working well, except for one thing: event reminder emails sent to registered participants are being sent in plain text, instead of html, so they are receiving text messages sprinkled with html code, like this:

leah.macfadyen
leah.macfadyen@ubc.ca

I've got a couple of forums with 7-800 topics each that I want to merge together. Both forums have the same parent container.

I've had a look at the forum table, and tried this sql query on a test site

UPDATE forum SET tid='xxx' WHERE tid='xxx'

This moved my topic out of the forum, left a "this topic has been moved to..." message, but it didn't reappear in the other forum, the link just led to the forum itself not a topic.

I'm assuming that:

nid = node id
tid = term id
vid = vocabulary id

In 4.6 I had a code snippet containing a form, where after submission I defaulted the form items based on the previous form entries. (Amongst other things it contains a day of the month, and next time around it defaults to the next day... a very specific one-a-day simple event entry).
After upgrading to 4.7 and making the relevant changes, I found that after submission the updates were done and then the form was redirected back to itself. This has the unfortunate side effect of losing the contents of the $_POST[] variable so I could no longer default my entry to the next day. Hunting through the api, I've discovered that if I set $form['#redirect'] = FALSE, I can prevent the redirection, but I'm also finding that the form retains it's previous entries and not my new ones. Can anyone help me out, and tell me if there is a way of doing what I would like to do?

A cut down version of the snippet follows. Thanks.

How secure is settings.php? Is it blocked to outsiders?
It contains my database credentials, and I am not sure it is safe enough.
I tried browsing to www.mydomain.com/sites/default/settings.php and got a blank page with empty source.
Is the hacker who is gonna to try to break into my site also gonna get a blank page, or is there some way he could get the actual settings.php file and see my db details?

Thanks!