Getting regular work through a firm or agency is an appealing prospect for many freelance web developers. One of the greatest benefits of working for an agency is having a team to work with instead of being solo on a project. It can be a good means of personal growth and development to have others working alongside you. Another perk is that you usually don’t have to deal with the client directly, which often involves educating them a lot and some occasional hand-holding. You can stick to what you love and what you’re good at and let the agency deal with administrative things like proposals, project scope, billing and customer communication. The agency does the work of looking for and securing the job, often spending many unbillable hours responding to RFPs and competing against other agencies for the work.

Harvest is, in our opinion, an indispensable web app for small businesses. It makes it easy to do what most small businesses struggle with: keep track of time and expenses. Harvest has an enviable lineup of features, including the ability to track time while you work, log expenses, invoice clients and more. They also have a great user interface, but the truth is that work happens everywhere and at ever hour, and sometimes it might not be ideal or convenient to go to the website to use the application. Fortunately, the Harvest team is in tune with the needs of small businesses. They created an excellent REST-style (REpresentational State Transfer) API for developers to enable the creation of 3rd-party applications. This opened a whole new world of possibilities regarding what can be done with the data and the service itself. Here at ImageX Media, we decided that a company-branded, reports-style site would work great for our clients and team members.

Presently there are nine of us from ImageX Media who are coming to Drupalcon San Francisco 2010 and we’re all quite excited for the conference to arrive. Session voting started recently and here are the ones we’ve prepared. We’re looking forward to sharing some of what we’ve been learning so we’d definitely appreciate your vote if any of these sessions hit a chord with you:

In my previous post I explained how to get up and running with OpenAtrium. Once you’ve done that you’re ready for the next step – creating a basic feature. Features is one of the cooler contrib modules I’ve seen in a while. It probably ranks just below MenuTrails on my list of totally awesome modules. Features allows you to create what are in effect mini-modules which contain code to import CCK types and fields, views, imagecache preferences, blocks, panels settings – pretty much anything that has an export/import function.