[FEAT] Composer Timeline

[Vladimir Waltham]

I hope I'm posting this in the right place!

There's a feature that I've been missing for some time now on IMSLP, I'm wondering how easy it would be to implement. It seems pretty necessary to me.

Rather than the rather clunky and completely arbitrary time frames imposed on this page:http://imslp.org/wiki/Browse_people_by_time_period, it seems to me it would be a lot clearer if we could look up composers on some kind of automated timeline. If we're using this feature at all, we're probably looking for people of a specific time/year, so clicking through and having an alphabetic list of composers is not entirely helpful. What I'm looking for specifically is something along these lines: http://www.mfiles.co.uk/infographics/ba ... elines.png, ideally with the option to sort by year of death as well as year of birth. It would make searching for composers by time a hell of a lot easier!

Without knowing the first thing about how this site works (so correct me if what i'm saying is bullsh*t), I imagine it could be automated to use the dates of birth and death from each composer page, so that content would be updated automatically. However, it looks like that might need some reformatting of the default composer page, to have years of birth and death in their own field, so maybe more work than really possible/affordable.

I'd be interested in knowing if this is someone else has been missing, and generally how useful people think this would be!

Vlad

[imslp]

Interesting, I'll think about it.

[pml]

Edward,

while you’ve got your thinking cap on as regards date- or year-related categories, there was also a suggestion here which touches on using our existing composer/person pages to automatically create birth year/death year categories, which would assist the sorts of searches or filtering that Vladimir would like.

Regards PML

[Vladimir Waltham]

Thanks both! And Eric's post (linked by PML) is definitely interesting and relevant to my query! I look forward to seeing some of this at some point in the future