添加自定义主题时，drupal管理页面上有500个内部服务器错误

I am trying to accomplish adding a custom theme to a drupal installation. Here is what I am doing and here is what I have tried:

1. I am downloading an instance of drupal 7 using acquia devdesktop.
2. I am using either php version 5.5 or 5.6.19 (both versions still get me the same error eventually.
3. I then navigate to sites/all/themes/ and create a new theme. In my case the folder is called homesite. I then add the files: -homesite.info -screenshot.png

And then here is when it gets a little tricky. I am able to see my new theme under the appearance tab in the drupal admin UI. I am able to enable my theme after clearing the cache. I am even able to add a page.tpl.php and start to see my theme come to life. But when i start adding more files - like html.tpl.php I immediately start getting a 500 insternal server error on the admin pages only. Sometimes i am not even able to add a page.tpl.php file before this starts happening.

After i start getting this error, i am no longer able to see any updates on any of the files take hold, but only once I start getting this error.

This tends to make me believe it is a memory limit issue, but when i change the memory limit in php.ini, I then only get a white screen on all urls.

I have tried uncommenting lines in the .htaccess file like 'RewriteBase /' and so on and so forth to no avail.

The answer is that when drupal was scanning my theme directory for .info files, it was getting caught up with all of the .info files in my node_modules directory.

Follow the directions on #4 on this link (#12 takes it a step further) https://www.drupal.org/node/2329453