Add additional concurrent timeline bands

Perhaps these bands could be hidden and revealed at the visitor's discretion, but the existence and availability of the bands should be administrator configurable.

You can get something like this by configuring two (or more) timelines as blocks (in their view settings), and then using some Drupal module which allows you to add blocks inline with content (I don't recall any names outhand, but I believe there are several modules providing functionality like this).

If this functionality is needed within one single timeline block/view, then it would require changes to the SIMILE widget used by the module, and should be submitted as a feature request upstream to the MIT SIMILE project's issue tracker.

Do you mean the "Views Fusion" module, or something else? Unfortunately, I can't get the "Views Fusion" module to work with the "Timeline" module. Theoretically, if I could get the two modules to work together and I were to set up a single timeline in each of two blocks, these timlines would pan together in tandem -- I think. I will post my support inquiry regarding Views Fusion over in their support area.

In the meantime, it does seem possible to add additional bands given the existing SIMILE widget. In these two examples, the MIT folks appear to have created additional bands:

Religion Timelines
Dinosaurs 2

The "Religion Timelines" page displays an effect similiar to what you've discribed using two blocks, but it appears to work within Timeline's existing framework. These juxtaposed comparison bands are almost exactly what I was asking about, minus the second zoomed-out overview band. Have they just pushed two "blocks" together or have they added bands?

I can see how the multiple zoomed-out overview bands of the "Dinosaur 2" timeline might be useful too. My timeline will grow to cover daily events across 2 centuries, and panning month by month may get tedious. However, comparison bands will be more helpful to me in the near-term than multiple zoomed-out overview bands.

I'm looking for implementing exactly the same features as fm:
1. The juxtaposed comparison bands
2. The multiple zoomed-out overview bands

Has there been any progress on implementing these 2 existing SIMILE timeline features into the Drupal module?

indeed, simile supports multiple bands. but it isn't clear how one could define each band within a single View. I think the right move is to let a timeline be composed of multiple Views. This should ideally be handled within timeline module, and not expect users to write code for this.

I've begun to add the capability for showing multiple bands in HEAD. The current idea is to use the 'grouping field' functionality which views now has and display each grouping in it's own band. I'll be keeping the discussion here in mind as I flush this out, and post back as it becomes ready to test.

"group by" functionality is now used for color coding and this makes even more sense to me.

I'm thinking about the feature of combining several views into one timeline. Every view could be displayed on a separate band. This would be way more flexible.

Great, very important function.