I need to create a way for users to enter recipe information into a wordpress page that can be displayed globally, on their buddypress user page, import/export based on a defined xml standard and accept reviews for each recipe. In one example the user would be able to enter more than one type of ingredient (i.e. tomatoes) with each item having the same level of detailed fields yet when exported to xml, each tomato would have its own <tomato> tags. Hope that makes sense.
My question is should I build a custom plugin or can custom post types work? If a custom plugin would provide the best solution, can you suggest reading material that would put me on the best path to create such a solution?
In that case, custom post types would work just fine. The Types plugin can automate a good part of it, including the admin interface to edit your recipes.
You could define a new taxonomy for ingredients.