This site was built in about an hour to demonstrate how to present events on a timeline, using as an example the decisions made by newspapers to cease publishing print editions. The components are:
Drupal 5.x. It's used rather than Drupal 6 because some of the modules listed below are not yet mature for the D6 platform. Download, create database, install, configure as usual.
Content Construction Kit module for Drupal. This extension makes it easy to create new structured content types. We'll get to that in a moment.
Date module for Drupal. This adds date/time fields and widgets to CCK, and provides a popup calendar that makes it easy to correctly specify dates.
Views module for Drupal. This is an all-purpose tool for querying the database and creating result sets without having to write SQL.
Timeline module for Drupal. This works with CCK and Views to create the actual timeline that's displayed on the front of the site. It integrates the Simile timeline widget from MIT into Drupal.
First, we created a new custom content type to record each "edition shutdown," then we added a Date field.
Then we created the timeline page as a View. The view type is "Timeline Horizontal," a choice that becomes available when you install the Timeline module. You have to specify fields -- in this example, Date and Title are made available to the Timeline widget. Filters are "Node: Published" and "Node: Type" "Is One Of" "Edition shutdown." Results are sorted by date, but it's not clear whether this is important.
The Timeline module didn't actually display any results until the settings were adjusted to fetch the Timeline Javascript component directly from MIT, rather than serving it locally.
The final change was to tell Drupal to display the timeline as the homepage, rather than the standard "river of news" list of items.