The Knight Lab TimelineJS  plugin is a powerful tool for creating visual timelines that can be embedded directly into your site’s pages and posts.  Each timeline entry can include (besides date and textual information), embedded images from Flickr, tweets from Twitter, video embeds from YouTube, DailyMotion, or Vimeo, articles from Wikipedia, sound from SoundCloud and map embeds from Google Maps.  You can easily control the display of your work using a WordPress shortcode.

Don’t forget to activate the Knight Lab TimelineJS plugin on your Commons site.

The process, described here in depth, is to make a Google Docs spreadsheet containing your content, publish it to the Web, create a page or post on your WordPress site, and then add a shortcode to display your timeline, using the web address of your Google Docs spreadsheet, plus any desired parameters. The shortcode should look something like this:

[timeline src="https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1oVnTNKW2a6dqf05BeLKCgjYJy-9q-Fv_EJbLJ4XJxXw/edit#gid=0" width="100%" height="650" font="Default" lang="en" version="timeline3" ]

Make sure the shortcode is the first, and only line in your page or post.

Your Google Docs spreadsheet should use this template. The spreadsheet has seven columns.  Only two are required, the start date and the headline.  Follow the pattern used in the template, and you should be good to go.

Check out examples of user created timelines at to get some ideas of what you can do.

Here is a video to help guide you through the four step process. (It does not cover how to create the WordPress shortcode.):