File directory error messages

I am not sure what advice to offer, but I just installed a brand new WordPress install and the Knight Lab Timeline plugin, and was able to successfully see the timeline.

There is no timeline-specific administrative interface, so it should be no suprise that it does not appear there.

We recognize that the short-code authoring is not modern WordPress, but I don’t know when we’ll have the internal resources to develop a block-based plugin.

In any case, the example below, entered into a shortcode block, worked as expected:

[timeline src=”https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/u/1/d/1xuY4upIooEeszZ_lCmeNx24eSFWe0rHe9ZdqH2xqVNk/pubhtml” width=”100%” height=”650″ font=”Default” lang=”en” version=”timeline3″ ]

From the error you report, you probably omitted ‘version=”timeline3″‘ which is correct, but which is not default so as not to change behavior for people who installed the plugin before Timeline version 3 (now about 6 years ago). If you make a new Timeline now using the tool at timeline.knightlab.com you will be guided to use the new spreadsheet format, which does not work without ‘version=”timeline3″‘ That is included by default when using the classic editor, but, again, we have not been able to invest resources in a Blocks-based update to the plugin.

We welcome code contributions!

Ah! We’ve always said that you can’t install plugins in WordPress.com. I see now that you must be on the business plan, which sounds familiar, but in any case, we don’t have access to WordPress.com with a business plan, so we can’t do much troubleshooting.

Assuming you are on a business plan, hopefully that money you’re paying can get you support — it sounds like they’ll at least take questions
https://wordpress.com/support/plugins/adding-plugins/#need-help-with-a-plugin

We’ll take your recommendation into account, although again, we’d generally thought it was not even possible to use plugins on WordPress.com. It seems as though, with clear evidence that it works on WP.org, that it’s specifically WP.com’s problem. Without a test framework or a profile to target, there’s no way a plugin developer can know their plugin works on WordPress.com without paying for the privilege of having a test environment!

The list of CSS classes should be essentially accurate, as nothing about that has changed in quite some time. However, note that, for historic reasons, the actual Timeline CSS uses very specific CSS selectors (basically a side effect of using LESS’s support for nested declarations and thinking that was a nice organizational cue, without considering that it would then require using as specific or more specific selectors to override.

Therefore, you are really probably best off using the base LESS to create an alternative design, or if not, literally copying the compiled CSS and using the documented classes more as a cue for searching than something you can override with a second stylesheet. (It’s also the case that the stylesheet is loaded in javascript, so it’s not easy to load your override styles after timeline.)

Truly supporting style customization won’t be possible without a major version upgrade that could break previous timelines, and that’s not currently on our roadmap.