"By the way I know this may sound really silly but have you changed the homepage's page type to home page? "
LOL! You're kidding, right? I think the question should be how many times have you changed the page type? I'm having a problem displaying summaries from article pages and blog entries that contain graphics on the homepage, but I noticed that they display fine on their parent pages, so I thought that changing the page type to BlogHolder or ArticleHolder would make a difference. It didn't. The text only article/blog summaries displayed perfectly but the summaries of articles containing graphics were still inserting several line breaks where the graphic was. I changed the page type via the drop down menu on the behaviour tab on the cms so it should have saved correctly as HomePage once I changed it back, but who knows... I'm sure if I looked at it long enough I would figure it out, but off the top of my head I wouldn't know how to change the page type outside of the cms.
Merde. It just occurred to me that we are talking about different home pages and maybe that is where I am going wrong. The actual "home" page assigned and required by SS is a Page.ss page and is unused and hidden. The page I am using as the site's home page is the NH Style page. This page uses the HomePage.ss template and is assigned the page name "home". (see attached homepage.jpg) I don't remember why or how I decided to set up the NH Style page as the homepage, but it had something to do with SS not allowing me to rename the actual home page in the navigation. Could this perhaps fall under the category of "something really silly"?
I'm generally competent with css and html and it passed W3C validation so I was pretty sure it wasn't a code issue, but it's good to know you didn't find one. (yet) As for the 500 error, I've tried several of the .htaccess suggestions I've found in the forum posts but they haven't worked. I've deleted, edited, and restored the various .htaccess files to their original contents and am still having this cursed server error. It started when I uploaded the subsites module. I couldn't get the tables to load and now I can't get the server error to go away.
Okay, enough for one night. I just realized that I haven't left the house since Sunday. Yikes!! I'll eventually figure this out and get a life. Of course with my luck it will be like a Twilight Zone episode and when I finally go out I'll find that the world has ended or zombies have taken over. Fortunately I live in a really old house so there is probably a fair amount of lead paint to protect me from whatever the aliens or zombies are doing on the outside. Is rambling a sign of senility or insanity? Definitely time for bed.
HB
PS: You would hope that Grandpa Phil would have left journals or something to let the youngins know that being dragged out of bed once a year by an old guy wearing a top hat and tails is the price to pay for the cushy digs. I believe that the official ground hog does get regular meals and a nice home as remuneration for the indignity.