On new installs when setting up sandbox sites, drupal sometimes has problems finding the correct database.

In phpMyAdmin, make sure you have root set up with all privleges for all databases on localhost. Then use root as the user in your settings.php file.

Once I changed the user to root, with the appropriate password and database name, everything worked fine.

Another infamous Drupal problem.

So okay, when you try to login, you are either returned to the login screen and/or get Access Denied. When you check your watchdog table, you notice two logins, one for yourself and the infamous user 0. And the session table lists at least two current sessions for your ip address.

In my case, it was probably caused by my creating a backup of my database while I was logged in and then downloading it to use on another site. It is caused by the browser storing multiple cookies for your drupal site.

The fix, using the developer toolbar in Firefox, delete all the session cookies. You may find yourself already logged in when you try your site. So logout then log back in. Everything should be fine.

When setting up a drupal site and you encounter the infamous blank page problem, i.e all you get is a blank page...

It is really helpful to find out what errors are being generated on your server.

On a OS X 10.4.8 Mac, I opened a terminal window and input the following, one command on each line.

cd /
cd var/log/httpd
tail error_log

In my case, I was getting a fatal php error due to coming up against a memory limit in php. If that happens to you, go to your settings.php file and add the following in the section with all the other php directives.

ini_set('memory_limit', '24M');


But check your error log to make sure you are fixing the correct problem!