I hope this is the right place for this question, but I need the advice of people with the most knowledge of how to develop Flexicontent. Just for the record, I've installed and maintained several Joomla sites, I can edit/write HTML & CSS easily, and I know just enough PHP to be able to edit some files to change a little of how they work (but not enough to write new ones from scratch).
I don't think that this is an issue which many have faced, but if I can get this to work I imagine that there will be others interested. I've started creating a large, detailed timeline that I'd like to publish online. It's currently in a local (Filemaker Pro) database, but I'd like to move it online, indexed with keywords, and delivered with Joomla (though I'm not averse to using something else like WordPress).
The idea is that a person should be able click on a date and see what happened that day in history. A breadcrumb-type trail based on the date would be ideal here, I think, making it easy to click to see events not just for that date, but also that month and year. They should also be able to click on a keyword and see more events related to that keyword, ordered by date.
I had at first hoped that just a basic WordPress install would work, creating a timeline that works in an interactive and user-friendly way. Something like WP or Joomla would provide lots of ways to customize presentation of the events, easy ways for me to add events, ways for others to submit new events, etc.
The problem until now (and why this project has been on the back burner for several years) has been the date. In a timeline, the date is the central organizing piece of data. MySQL though can only handle years going back to 1901 (and the native Joomla dates are worse!) but I need dates that are BC and must therefore be entered as negative numbers for proper ordering.
I posted about this on the Joomla! forum and was advised that I could perhaps achieve what I want using three numeric fields for the date values and a CCK like Flexicontent to deliver the information. So what I need at a minimum is to store some text as an article, three numbers as date values, and some tags. I would be happy to be able to display the information in a basic blog format — nothing too fancy.
I think that the front page would need to be able to display the events for the current date, sorted by year (or maybe the first few plus "read more"). It probably wouldn't look right otherwise. Major menu links would be to important tags (like war > wwii, wwi, etc.; religion > Christian, Muslim, etc.).
These are some "would be nice" features:
1. Nested tags
2. A front page that displays all the events from today's date back in history
3. To continue the "seamless" experience, a clickable calendar display (even if small)
4. The ability to vary the background color of each entry, depending on what keywords are present (and this would get complex because keyword A would be one color if keyword Z is present, but another color if keyword X is present).
So my question is: can I accomplish my basic needs here with Felxicontent? Would another CCK be better suited? What about the "would be nice" features — are they doable or even just possible if I learn enough programming? I'm willing to put in the work to achieve them, though if someone is already working on something that will help that's even better.
The biggest problems that come to mind for me are, first, linking my date values with the real date for things like the front page. Second would be linking the month value with month names so that users see "May" on the front even though everything is done as "5" in the back. Or might it be possible to use a text string and make it so the system knows that "January" comes before "April" rather than after?
