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A number of you are my friends on Facebook and may have wondered why I got so excited a few days ago about DrupalCon Paris (which I'm not attending -- it's happening right now) and the accompanying "code freeze" of Drupal 7.  Without getting too technical, here are some of the recent developments and what they mean for you as Drupal users.

1. Only two versions of Drupal are maintained at a time.  Currently that's 5 and 6, but as soon as Drupal 7 is released, Drupal 5 will be discontinued.  All the sites I work on are already running Drupal 6 except for SmartphoneMag.com and its Ubercart site... in the upcoming months I'll be working hard to move them to Drupal 6 so that they won't be running unmaintained software.  (The danger of running unmaintained software is if a bug is found, it may not get fixed.)  The timeline of the Drupal 7 release is detailed in a recent blog post by founder Dries Buytaert.
2. Drupal 7 is the first version to emphasize user-friendliness.  Seriously, it hasn't been a priority until now.  But two years ago, the then-new Drupal 6 was subjected to a merciless bout of usability testing at three major universities, and it failed very embarrassingly, and the Drupal core developers resolved that that wouldn't happen again.  I'm itching to get my hands on Drupal 7 to see how much more friendly it is.  Technical details on the changes in Drupal 7 can be found in my notes from a presentation in March.
3. Dries's keynote speech from Paris hasn't been released on the Web yet, but according to his blog he announced that his for-profit company, Acquia, will soon offer Drupal hosting services.  For small sites (like most of yours), they will offer a Drupal-7-based service called Drupal Gardens, and for large sites (like iPhoneLife.com) they will offer a high-performance, "cloud-based" (distributed) architecture called Acquia Hosting.  Since hosting is a perpetual concern for any site, I'll keep a close eye on these services so I can give you professional advice.

I'll be among the first to download Drupal 7 when it goes alpha, and I'll keep you posted!