After releasing Chronicles, we’ve been listening carefully to your feedback, suggestions, and ideas to plan the next steps for the feature. And now we’re ready to show you our Chronicles roadmap for the next two updates!
In case you missed it, you can learn more about the awesomeness of Chronicles here!
Version 1.0.5: Tighter World Anvil integration
This version is all about tightening the integration between Chronicles and the rest of your world, as well as some minor updates and bug squashing! These features will be rolled out progressively instead of being released all at once.
Integration features
- Importing historical events from regular timelines into a chronicle.
- Importing images uploaded to the world into the chronicle.
- Addition of a new event block, which you’ll be able to use to embed events from a chronicle in an article.
- Selecting existing map images in your world for a chronicle (instead of uploading it separately). Importing pins won’t be supported at first, but it is planned long-term.
- Support for BBCode embed tags! You’ll be able to embed manuscripts, images, statblocks, and external content like YouTube videos in event and location descriptions.
- You’ll be able to display a Chronicles timeline as a traditional timeline
Minor updates and bug fixes
- Pins will display the number of events linked to it.
- Invisible pins will be added to maps.
- When setting the end date for an event, the pre-selected day will be the end of the last month instead of the first day of the first month.
- Searching for a map in the map manager will also search the maps’ descriptions.
- The event manager will have a button to jump to each event in the timeline. No more frantic scrolling to find that one day long event!
- Clicking on an event in a collection sidebar will no longer close the collection so you can switch between events more easily. A collection is a group of events that are displayed in the same place on the timeline—when you click it, they are displayed on the left sidebar.
- You’ll be able to change an event’s color right from the General tab. If you’re in an event-adding spree, you won’t need to keep switching tabs anymore!
- FontAwesome will be updated to version 6 and you’ll be able to use FontAwesome and RPG Awesome icons as map pins.
- Currently, the cursor doesn’t turn into the “pointing hand” when it’s hovering an article embed. This will be fixed!
Of course, if other issues are discovered they will be added to the list!
Version 1.1: Eras and other timeline updates
This version will include eras, as well as other timeline-related features and UX improvements. There is no specific date for this update either, but it will come after the updates above are done. In addition to implementing eras, there will be the following new features:
- Change the number of lanes for each timeline (between 1 and 6).
- Ability to have different calendars in each timeline.
- There will be a list of maps so that viewers can switch between them without looking for the events.
- You’ll be able to duplicate events.
- You’ll be able to drag the timeline panel up to show more than two timelines without scrolling.
- Change the color of the timeline’s label.
- The most common icon and color combinations will be recorded and suggested to you for a faster workflow.
- For the CSS pros out there, each lane will be customizable individually.
- You’ll be able to make a timeline visible again after hiding it with the quick switch (instead of having to go to the timelines manager to do it).
When can I expect these updates?
Community feedback, as well as development of other features and feature complexity, are factors that can influence how long it takes for an update to be released. But instead of having a specific date, we stick to “quality over quantity”: these updates will come when they’re ready!
What do you think about these updates? Let us know in the comments! And create a World Anvil account today to try out Chronicles.
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Are there plans to incorporate calendar features like recurring holidays, celestial object phases, intercalary dates, and names of days of the week (to name a few)?
It’s a bit annoying to cross-reference from chronicles to calendars
For now, the only plans that are more or less set in stone are the ones in this roadmap. I can tell you there are plans that go beyond what you can see here, but they’re still not defined enough to talk about them.
Hello, are there any plans to change the granularity of the timeline to include months? Years are too far apart while Days are too zoomed in, so it’s perplexing that months have not made it in as a preferred time unit.
As far as I know, that’s currently not planned. But you’re welcome to suggest is as a feature here: https://www.worldanvil.com/community/voting/
According to Dimitri’s answer here, it should be somewhere on the roadmap, although I cannot see months mentionned here.
https://www.worldanvil.com/community/voting/suggestion/a87c770a-cd4b-4d84-86b9-e454147416e0/view
I cannot wait for the 1.0.5 version of Chronicles. The importation of historical events would be a lifesaver, considering a pre-existing world easily reach one or several hundreds of events.
Chronicles are possibly the most exciting improvement to World Anvil since one or two years and I hope you will not encounter too many difficulties improving it.
Hello! Do you have any news on these updates ?
Not yet, but thank you for asking! This would be the space to watch.
We also have a newsletter that will also include updates like this – wink wink, nudge nudge
Love the chronicles. Has made running my campaigns about 1000% easier.
Two things that I wish the system offered
A way to view all of the events for a chronicle as a list.
Map Layers or events tied to multiple markers – for example a city exists but the world around it changes – so if I associate an event with a city during a period on on one map, to associate a later event I either have to go back to the OLD map or create a new marker and thus lose the continuity of events.
Have you already started working on the next version? And would it be a dumb idea to release a new version after e.g. 1-2 of the features have been done, instead of waiting for the entire package? 🙂 Say you have finished support for BBCode, why not release it so those who are waiting for that specific feature can start using it sooner? Thanks!
Hi! We’re currently working on upgrading other parts of the website. We’ll be following at this roadmap next time we work on Chronicles!
Hello Roc, may I ask if the work on Chronicles is planned or already began?
Hello Marc! Chronicles was released several months ago—you can access it under the Timelines menu if you have a Guild subscription. This post is specifically talking about future updates, and development on most of it hasn’t started yet as we’re focused on other project with higher priority right now.
Is there a way to Port an existing timeline into a chronicle?
Not yet, but importing events into Chronicles is planned for a future update.
When should version 1.0.5 be available? As it was announced 1 year ago, I guess it should come soon?
I wouldn’t expect it soon—as I mentioned, development hasn’t started yet because we’re focused on other projects. We don’t publish deadlines when we announce future plans because we prefer to take our time to provide quality features rather than rushing things through. But I can say that development on this hasn’t started yet, so it will take a while.