I encountered this problem while setting up a new site. At the time I had only two pages and one image and was working on customizing a theme in order to duplicate my current site, http://www.astrofoto.org/. I also posted this in the forums where I found someone with a similar problem. Here are my notes for that http://drupal.org/node/36247#comment-114146

The short summary is that somehow, the site_frontpage row in the variables table ended up being set to 's:5:"node "'---note the extra space. This may have been after I modified my second page to have it not be promoted to the front page. My cure was to manually change the column value to have a trailing slash instead of a space.

Looking at the code in menu.inc, it looks to me like it should have worked with just "node" but it required the "node/".

I'll try to see if I can duplicate the problem. I'm unclear how the space got there since I don't even know (yet) how to configure what node to use as a front page....

Comments

rbroberts’s picture

rbroberts commented

I've been unable to duplicate this so I'm not sure what to think.

killes@www.drop.org’s picture

killes@www.drop.org commented
Status: Active » Closed (won't fix)

I think that you added the trailing space on the admin/settings page. Not sure we really need input checking there.

rbroberts’s picture

rbroberts commented
Version: 4.7.0-rc3 » 4.7.0

Your comment is fair, and I've wondered if I did, in fact, inadvertently do just that.

BTW, it would probably be nice if the issue tracker had a "not a bug" status---if it was in fact my error, then this isn't a bug that won't be fixed, it isn't a bug....

ijulie’s picture

ijulie commented

I'm having a similar problem, which isn't caused by a trailing space. I've tried changing and resetting the variable in the database multiple times to no avail. you can see it at http://j-l-r.org/projectjulie/

this is a multisite installation, and when I look at the logs it's actually a 403 error. when I turn on indexing I get the subdirectory's index. so somehow the homepage, whatever it's set to, isn't forwarding correctly to the main drupal installation's index.php?

I'm also running 4.6.8, so I don't know how related this even is, but this is the closest description I could find to my problem.