Post installation

Hello,

I have the following code which will give me a list of links to certain nodes within a taxonomy term:

I had a running drupal installation but now i am running into problems. When i click on some menu links, i get a completely white html page with a message "Could not connect" written in plain text on the top left corner of the page. It could be that my drupal scripts are not being able to connect to the backend (mysql) database. But usually if that is the case then, drupal gives a neat error page saying "could not connect to database ...." . But in my case i am not getting any response except for a white blank page with the error as mentioned before.

I have drupal 4.7.3 on a dedicated server. I edit the php.ini to

session.save_handler=user
(default is files)

because of the install instructions.

http://drupal.org/requirements

"PHP needs the following configuration directives for drupal to work:
session.save_handler: user"

this breaks phpmyadmin.

in fact, I just checked my site on opensourcehost.com, session.save_handler was set to files.

With 4.6, when you validated a form in a module you were able to change the value.

For instance, if you had a field $node->widgets, with the validation function you could also change the value, for instance from upper to lower case, and you could even set the value of $node->body and $node->teaser.

With 4.7, this doesn't seem to work. I can set an error message, but I can't seem to change the value at all. It doesn't change if there's an error and the form reloads and it doesn't change when the values are updated or inserted. Am I missing something.

What I'm wondering is this:

How do Forms API fields of '#type' => 'value' not actually get sent to the browser? My assumption is that the values were somehow stored in the session, but I haven't detected any session code in form.inc. Am I missing something? Could somebody please unveil the magic trick?

Thanks so much.
-Scott

PS. I'm just trying to get an in-depth knowledge of the Forms API and this aspect has completely stumped me.

I began trying to move the site to https. I found it quite hard. all my sites broke with a "cannot connect to database server" or "cannot connect to site (connection refused)"
even after i uninstalled openssl.

In a post this week, someone apparently did it by simply adding an "s" to http in the base url. at the same time, i've seen some very lengthy threads about https.