Textpattern CMS

#1 2005-11-29 22:18:59

marknumberm

Member

From: Minneapolis

Registered: 2005-11-29

Posts: 46

Use TXP to create a historical timeline

Hi, everyone.

I have what I think is a really cool idea. I don’t think it should be very difficult, but it’s proving to be a bigger pain than I’d thought it would be. Any help will be greatly appreciated. :)

Basically, I want to create a database of articles on historical events.

Rather than displaying those articles in order of the date that I created them, however, I’d like them to be ordered by the date in which the event they describe took place. On the main page of the site, only the dates, article titles, and perhaps the first few lines of the description would be visible — thus creating something like a timeline as an interface to access the articles

I was very excited to try out TXP for this purpose, because when G1.17 came out, one of the features listed was that the timestamp could be set to “any damn century.”

However, when I played around with this, I discovered it’s not actually the case. If you set the date to anything earlier than 1969, it defaults back to that year. In looking at other support forum discussions, I gathered that this functionality never ended up working properly.

It seems to me that there would be another way to skin this cat, though, and perhaps one that will work even better for my purposes, probably using custom fields for year, month, and date combined with the sortby function.

Ideally, each article describing an event that took place in a certain year would be listed under that article year, set as a heading. If there is also a value entered in the month and/or day fields for an individual article, it would be listed before the article title.

For a timeline of World War II, for example, there would be something like this:
<heading>1939</heading>
Sept. 1: Germany invades Poland [linked to the article…]
Sept 3: France, UK, New Zealand, Australia, declare war on Germany [linked…]
Oct. 6: Last Polish army defeated [linked…]

<heading>1940</heading>
April 9: Germany invades Denmark and Norway [linked…]
May: France, Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg invaded [linked…]
June 22: France signs armistice with Germany[linked…]
….
<heading>1945</heading>
The post-war period begins [NOTE: no month and day assigned so nothing shows up]

I’d also like to be able to use categories and have articles assigned to a given category show up on a new page and display in the same way as described above. So if you clicked on the “Political Events” category, for example, you’d see all the articles in that category arranged in the same year-as-heading format.

Here’s one tricky part: Some of the actual dates that I’ll be using will be BCE. Can I handle that with a negative number in the custom field? The initial experiments that I ran indicated that the answer is no. Anyone have thoughts on that?

In general, my question is whether you think TXP will be a good application for handling this task. I have a bit more experience with WP, but poking around with it leads me to believe it won’t handle a job like this very well. Its custom fields are not very easy to use. However, if you think that WP, or any other program, would work better, please let me know. Better I find it out now rather than later. (And I’ll think that TXP is a cool CMS no matter what…I’ve been quite impressed.)

If you do think that TXP will handle this job well, please point me in the right direction for setting it all up. Does the idea of having three custom fields for year, month, date, sound like a reasonable one? What about ideas of how to get the year to show up as a heading? Will the categories listing be as simple as I’m hoping?

Anyhow, I’ll appreciate any help or direction anyone can offer.