Question

Some people have reported issues with accessing, setting, or getting the right value from baseUrl() in a view script. But I’m wondering why it is necessary to use it at all, at least in a situation like mine where the ZF application is on a virtual private host (Amazon EC2) where I have full control of the directory structure and apache rewrite rules, as well as routes.

I know, for example, that in the filesystem foo.jpg lives in public/images/foo.jpg, and that the application’s mod_rewrite will direct all requests to public – so in my view scripts it’s a lot simpler/clearer and more efficient to write something like

<img src="/images/foo.jpg" />

instead of

<img src="<?php echo $this->baseUrl();?>/images/foo.jpg" />

What sort of future-proofing robustness or other benefit does the use of baseUrl() really provide? So far I haven’t used it at all, and had no problem. But I’ve inherited some code that uses it, and my inclination is to strip out those uses whenever I’m editing a view script that contains them. Would I regret that later?

Answer 1

Used this way, it’s not really useful, but on the other hand, using it this way

echo $this->baseUrl('/images/foo.jpg')

might prove to be useful in the future since you can add logic before printing the URL. Imagine that in a few years your website grows way more than you expected and you have to move all your static content to a Content delivery network (CDN) you will have to manually (or with search and replace) correct all your images/css/js instances URLs. With the baseUrl() (or as name it assetUrl()) you would just have to add your CDN’s url and it will be fixed everywhere in your application.

EDIT

I found a use for the baseUrl() in the code you inherited :

It would allow you to add a common URL part to all of your links and references, in the case that your site is not at the root of the domain

i.e. : www.mysite.com/zf-app/

In your config file you would just have to add

resources.frontController.baseUrl = "/zf-app/"

for it to work, and all of your links would be prepended with that part