The IMTA was founded 20 years ago by a handful of visionary therapists who recognized the upsurge of public interest in complementary therapies. Today, IMTA is one of the most respected associations in the complementary field of health care in Ireland.

IMTA promote continuing education for our therapists and open communication between therapists, clients and other health-care professionals.

They are actively promoting the regulation of massage therapy in Ireland. They have an education committee working towards the establishment of an Irish national examination system.

Currently 500+ massage and bodywork therapists are registered members of the IMTA.

As the number of members is increasing IMTA wants to procure a membership management system with a latest website integrated with it to improve the day to day management of information of their various members spread around the country in Ireland.

The membership management system should also look after the email communication with the members.

The website is also expected to provide most up to date information about the current members of the IMTA to the visitors of the website, who wish to publish their information online.

The website should have a section for members only where information specific to members can be provided to them after they login with a username and password.

Based on the requirements of IMTA, Target Integration provided

→     Content Management System (Joomla) based website

→     Membership Management System (CiviCRM) and

→     Cloud Web Hosting Server

The Membership Management System is fully integrated with the website and same as the Content Management System it is a web based application.

CiviCRM is leading Membership Management Software for membership based organizations. CiviCRM provides a user friendly interface to manage the information of members. CiviCRM has also been selected because of being open source which allows future customization and no ongoing licensing costs to the IMTA. CiviCRM is integrated with Joomla and Drupal content management systems.

Joomla was selected because of the user friendly interface. It allows users to manage the content of the website from an administrator interface and the users get to see the difference between administrator and visitor interface.

The data from the current website was transferred over to Joomla. Members’ information was cleaned up using Extract Transform & Load (ETL) tool called Pentaho Spoon. The information was then transferred over to the new database and custom fields were created for the members’ information such as Massage Type, Regional Location Code etc.

The whole solution was Linux Apache MySQL and PHP (LAMP) based and hence a cloud server was provided to IMTA which looked after the hosting of the website and membership management application. IMTA website gets a large number of page views every month and hence a powerful hosting serer was very important for the success of the project.