marksbrainI want to create an historical timeline that uses WP posts as places to collect information on historical events and something based on Justin Blanton's smart archives plugin to put the posts in chronological order. This archives page would essentially create the actual "line" of the timeline, so to speak.
If you look at the archives for Justin's own site, or any other WP blog that uses his plugin, you can see how it would work.
Headings would be a month and year; underneath each heading would be listed events that took place during that month. Clicking on an event would take the user to a page with further information on the event and, if you like, opportunity to leave comments on how the event is described or what other information should be included.
For a timeline of World War II, for example, there would be something like this:
<heading>September 1939</heading>
*Sept. 1: Germany invades Poland [linked to further information on this in a WP post]
*Sept 3: France, UK, New Zealand, Australia, declare war on Germany [linked...]
<heading>October 1939</heading>
*Oct. 6: Last Polish army defeated [linked...]
<heading>April 1940</heading>
*April 9: Germany invades Denmark and Norway [linked...]
One other cool possibility would be using categories so that the user could look at just the events within the timeline that have to do with political events, or scientific discoveries, or whatever. By creating relevant tags for individual posts, WP would allow you, essentially, to create sub-timelines around different topics.
Difficulties
This is where I would love some community support from people who know more than I know about WP and PHP. As you might have guessed, the main issues to be resolved are:
- How to set the date on a given post to any date that you want. Is there a plugin, or even something within the original release, that allows this?
- If there is a method for doing this, does it allow dates very far back in the past? Such as 1066? Or what about 6 AD? Or most improbably of all, what about 12,000 BC? Any tips on where to begin creating something that would allow such dates?
- Also, for some events in the distant past you won't have a month, or it would be odd to use one. Is it possible to create a post without a month on it?
Thanks in advance to anyone who can offer ideas -- and if you think this solution is ridiculous on its face and there's a clearly better way to accomplish what I want, let me know that to.
Dgold
