As the explosive growth of Drupal continues, so does the eco-system of vendors and products around it. Included is the plethora of Drupal books that continues at a somewhat unbelievable pace. It seems that there are at least two to three new releases each month. Unfortunately, in the rush to quench the tech community's thrist for Drupal knowledge, sometimes less-than-stellar books are being served up before they're fully baked (cooking pun #1).

This guest post was written by Ben Hosmer, a Drupal user new to module development as well as an active member of the Florida Drupal user community. He often blogs about Drupal related topics at radarearth.com

I was very proud to participate in the official DrupalCon Pre-Conference Training again this year. I decided to repeat my Intro to Drupal Theming class, especially since drupal 7 was such new territory. Our class size was limited to 20 students, which sold out in advance of the conference.

Every Drupal site I build involves at minimum two environments: one is on my laptop, which I call the local server; another is what most people call the production server. Drupal has a very straightforward way of allowing you the developer to use a single code base to run both environments, even though they are on different machines, in different corners of the world, with different passwords, etc.

At the most recent Florida Drupal User's Group meetup, I gave a quick rundown of some of the new stuff that has made it into Drupal 7 core. It was by no means an in-depth look, it was mainly designed to give people a quick update on what they have to look forward to in the next version of Drupal.