Structured data in Joomla

Question

I'm currently developing a back-end for chefs at various restaurants to report their daily menues in a structured format. Of pragmatic reasons have I chosen to use a web CMS and use many of the features already include including a flexible rights-management module

I want to utilise the existing functions in Joomla for access control, editing and navigation, but I need to replace the textfield with five field (each representing one day of the working week) and save this in a structured way into the database. I was planning to create a editor plugin which displays the field for the chef-users and parse the in-data into a structured data-format e.g. XML. For each week I will need to create empty templates for all the restaurants displaying the week number and dates.

I was also hoping for third-party developers to access this data through RESTful methods in the URL where the structure could be something like: http://domain.no/restaurant-name/menu for a text-menu http://domain.no/restaurant-name/json for json etc.

I guess my question is how I can start developing such features. Has there been developed anything similar and are there modules developed for Joomla which I can utilise? Does my approach sounds sensible or are there any other good way of solving my problem?

Answer 1

For a custom content management i would use Zoo component from Yootheme (not free!). You can define your fields,

But for developers access, i have no idea, sorry!