Question

Anyone know why Magento won’t allow symbolic links for template .phtml files that are outside the app/design folder?

If I do a symlink within that folder, it works fine, but if it’s linked outside that, it doesn’t work. So it seems like it’s some permissions/security thing, but I can’t find any info anywhere.

Possibly a Zend setting? http://zend-framework-community.634137.n4.nabble.com/Zend-Tool-not-working-with-symbolic-links-in-include-path-td662569.html

Anyone?

WORKAROUND: Thanks to Alan’s suggestion below I found a workaround – as I’ll only be using this myself for local development I’m happy enough. In case this helps anyone else, I’m gonna add it here. So I’m inserting the following in core/Mage/Core/Block/Template.php, directly after the line Varien_Profiler::start($fileName);

    $storeId = Mage::app()->getStore()->getId();
    $theme = Mage::getStoreConfig('design/package/name', $storeId);
    Mage::Log($this->_viewDir.DS.$fileName); 
    $includes = $this->_viewDir.DS.$fileName; 
    if(strpos($includes, 'frontend/'.$theme )) { 
         include $this->_viewDir.DS.$fileName;
        };

Using the IF statement here stops any base templates being doubled, and only allows your custom theme templates through.

Answer 1

As of Magento 1.5.1.0 (maybe 1.5.x?) there is an option at System > Configuration > Developer > Template Settings > Allow Symlinks that you can enable.

No need for dirty hacks/workarounds anymore. 🙂