On the Tutorialzine site there's a recent post looking at the creation of an advanced timeline that combines jQuery, PHP and CSS similar to the one Google has.

Today we are making an Advanced Event Timeline with the help of PHP, MySQL, CSS & jQuery, that will display a pretty time line with clickable events. Adding new ones is going to be as easy as inserting a row in the database.

The tutorial includes the XHTML to create the items on the page (like the slider container and the bar), the PHP to get the data from the database and dynamically add the elements for each event, the jQuery code to make the fun slider work and the CSS to style everything.