General developer forum

I'm trying to develop my first moodle plugin but I'm running into some problems.

First of all:

When I install my activity plugin that works fine. However when I go to "Site administration -> plugins -> activity modules -> manage activities". The amount of activities shows Error instead of a number.
Anyone has a clue why that is happening?

My second problem is I can't seem to get the settings form working,
for my plugin I need to store the settings in a custom table. So I thought of writing my own settings page and including it using the admin_externalpage function. However I can't get it to work, I end up getting section errors all along. But when I use the add method in the admin tree, All I get is "parent does not exist!". And I can't figure out how to fix this.

Googling didn't help much either.