Referencing Assets in Drupal

Question

I'm helping a colleague configure a new box for an existing Drupal install with multiple sites. It's functioning, but I've noticed that all assets are being referenced as /sites/<site-name>/files/image.png. I don't know from Drupal, but it strikes me that Drupal should be abstracting the logical site from the code so that site-specific assets could be referenced as /files/image.png and Drupal would figure out -- perhaps based on HTTP_HOST -- which site is meant.

In this case, we need separate snapshots of the same site (dev and staging) so we'd like to be able to store the paths without specifically referencing one site or the other. We can do some rewriting to manage this, but I'm wondering whether there's something that we simply don't know.

Does Drupal do this natively in some way? If not, what are others doing to manage this kind of abstraction? Surely we're not the first to encounter this and think there must be a better way.

Thanks.

Answer 1

That would be an interesting module. The Files directory can be in the following locations:

sites/<site name>/files (standard for multi sites, public)

or

sites/default/files (standard installation for single sites, public)

That is, if you want to use the public files method.

Read here if you want to learn about the private files method (very similar to your thought): http://drupal.org/documentation/modules/file