I'm working on a project right now that requires great flexibility on the date-selector. Users may insert dates several thousands of years ago, as well as dates all the way up to today. Typical date-selectors are great for selecting dates within a few years from eachother, but not too well when it comes to selecting dates of vast differences.
Has anybody seen a plugin that would handle this requirement easier? Perhaps old-fashion hand-entry will be required here.
I like how Vista's calendar makes it easy to pick any year/month/day. I could not find if there is a jQuery plugin which mimics Vista style date picker but there is a mootools version which looks great.
http://www.monkeyphysics.com/mootools/script/2/datepicker#examples
Alternatively, sometimes it's best to let user type in the date. If your users are little savvy, you can use Datejs library and create some shortcuts so that they can enter dates easily.
http://www.datejs.com/2007/11/27/getting-started-with-datejs/
And yes, I would love to know what kind of project needs to handle such a wide date range!
EDIT:
Thinking about it some more, how about modifying existing date picker plugin so that user can double click on a year and it becomes an input field where user can type in the year? Similarly double clicking on the month leads to 4x3 grid where user can select month quickly (Like how the Vista calendar behaves).
Maybe you could use something like Flot and have a chart with the X axis being datetime. The chart would be inverse log so that the distance between 1000BC and 1900BC would be similar to the difference between 1999AD and 2000AD (since nearer dates need more accuracy I would think).
after doing some usability research for an application to manage a kindergarden involving a lot of date entries, what works best for my users was the masked plugin, where the input textfield has __/__/____ . I used this excellent Masked Input plugin. If you only need to enter the year, then simply set a 4 digit pattern.