Graham Weldon

CakePHP, a visual history: 0 - 1.3.0

Friday, 7 May 2010
Tagged: Website, General

This is a short post, but hopefully an interesting one. I've been messing around with Gource which is adamn funky tool for producing sexy visualisations from version control systems. While we've seen this functionality from Code Swarm before, I felt the result from Gource was far better in comparison.

What I have produced is a fast-paced visual history of the CakePHP repository from the point it was initiated in the current timeline (First frame on 16th May 2005) up until today (close to the release a few days back for CakePHP 1.3.0. The result is nothing short of awesome.

Without further ado (whatever that means), here's the video. For best results, you should view this in full screen, or at least the HD wide screen version.

Like I said... awesome.

Here's the command line I used:

$ gource -s 0.05 --disable-progress --user-image-dir gource-gravatars --hide filenames --stop-at-end --user-scale 2 --highlight-all-users --output-ppm-stream - | ffmpeg -y -b 3000K -r 60 -f image2pipe -vcodec ppm -i - -vcodec libx264 -vpre default cakephp-1.3-20100507.mp4

Its my third attempt at a decent result with it, but I'm still new to Gource. If you have any comments or suggestions, I urge you to comment below and help me out.

One oddity with the generation was that I had gone to the effort to gather all the Gravatar images for contributors with a quick and dirty PHP script. Even though Gource found the images (and complained when they were not present after specify to use them) they were not included in the visualisation. Some tinkering may be needed to get this working correctly.

Anyway, I hope you enjoyed that! Look out for a few more videos coming your way detailing shorter periods in the history of CakePHP, with CakePHP 1.2.0 to 1.3.0 being my first in mind.