I'm writing this entry 3 months after the event asking myself 'what did I get out of the 3 days at DrupalCon Paris and can I justify going to DrupalCon San Francisco mid April?'.

Thanks to numerous talks on the 960 Grid System by Mark Boulton and others, we are now all grided up and saving CSS time using alpha, omega, suffix and prefix classes already set up in a well structured and documented CSS framework. We were designing with grids before, it's just they were are own grids which suffered from a lack of consistency - again another demonstration of how opensource puts you ahead.

Mr merlinofchaos (Earl Miles), major drupal contributor of Panels fame, switched us on to Panels 3. Writing custom templates and combining these with the 960 Grid System makes our lives a lot easier now.

There is no doubt that attending these conferences is worth it vis-a-vis technical know how, working out production methodologies, making contacts etc... but one of the most important things for me was gaining an understanding of the opensource spirit and learning to enjoy the community that surrounds Drupal.