This may be an event module issue: historical dates, like Edgar Allen Poe's birth (1800's) show up as the year 1970. In general, such historical dates behave very badly. I'm also not sure how such dates would scale in Drupal's event system, so I wonder if there should be a seperate module that works with timeline to formulate events-- timelines could potentially be used to document entire lifetimes (with publication dates spread through decades, if we are talking literature), whereas the event module has day to day events in mind. If I file a bug report with event, would they see this as being in the scope of their project? I'm not sure.

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vm’s picture

vm commented

Thats typical of the php date range. php as a language begins the date at 1970.
there is a date.module available in the downloads area, that may extend date previous to 1970.
I do not know if it ties in with this module in anyway.

At this stage though, its not a bug with timeline as much as it is a limitation of the language of php

Arto’s picture

Arto commented
Assigned: Unassigned » Arto
Arto’s picture

Arto commented
Category: bug » feature
Status: Active » Postponed

Unfortunately, Kenn is correct - PHP's date functions (as of PHP4, anyway) use Unix timestamps internally, and those only work for the time span of 1970 to 2038. Obviously this is very deficient for representing historical or future dates in any way.

The best bet for solving the problem in Drupal would be to work with the Date project to ensure that CCK content types can use historical dates. Once someone can confirm that this works well, I will have another look at this (since once CCK supports this, the necessary changes to the Timeline module would be relatively straightforward, if not exactly trivial).

Arto’s picture

Arto commented
Title: Historical times and dates do not function properly » Historical dates prior to 1970 do not work
Arto’s picture

Arto commented

Note the Date project follow-up Chad has kindly posted at #102438.

Arto’s picture

Arto commented
Status: Postponed » Fixed

Preliminary support for historical dates has been added in changeset [56396]. Anyone willing to test it out is encouraged to grab the latest DRUPAL-4-7 tarball as soon as it's been rebuilt (by tomorrow).

Historical dates starting from 100 CE are now fully supported when using CCK content types with Date fields and having the ADOdb Date/Time library installed per provided instructions. (That's a lot of prerequisites, but there's nothing to be done about that.)

However, note that the timeline's default display granularity may currently make scrolling large timespans (say, a couple of hundred years) impractical, as it is configured for day-to-day events, not year-to-year. I'll have to see about adding an option to "zoom out" for a longer-term perspective on a timeline-by-timeline specific basis.

Arto’s picture

Arto commented

Changeset [56426] adds the ability to specify which time interval units to use on the upper and lower band of the timeline display. (The choices are: second, minute, hour, day, week, month, year, decade, century, and millennium.)

This should now provide all that's needed for creating historical timelines. I'll roll up a release 1.1 once some eager early adopters have tested these new features (grab the updated DRUPAL-4-7 once the auto-build scripts have run), and I've had some more time to document all the new stuff in README.txt.

bomarmonk’s picture

bomarmonk commented

I am trying the February 16th version of timeline (4.7., not head), and I can't see where I adjust to decades, centuries, years, etc.

bomarmonk’s picture

bomarmonk commented

Well, I guess I should have tried the "head" version. Even though the 4.7 development and the "head" version have the same "last updated" date, they are apparently different. I now have some nice control over the measuring stick for the timeline (years, centuries, etc.). This is incredibly cool stuff!

I will test for bugs. One issue that I've discovered is that the "initial date focus" doesn't seem to work when it is set to the last date or first date in timeline. I'm using this in conjunction with the date module and CCK (there is only one event type involved here). The last date goes clear back to the early 1900's.

bomarmonk’s picture

bomarmonk commented

I filed a separate bug report for the "initial date focus" problem. See http://drupal.org/node/121295

Anonymous’s picture

(not verified) commented
Status: Fixed » Closed (fixed)