DragonWize wrote: <snip>
Making the file path in the files table relative to the files folders would just require one change throughout drupal (core and contrib), you would have to do something like this when you link to a file:
drupal_get_files_path() . $relative_file_path_in_db
As that produces the direct link and the file is public accessible, drupal is not loaded.
I think we're talking about two different things (sort of) -- you are saying that the path in the files table would be relative to the files dir, but the normal real path would still be presented to the user's client, so normal http could still be used. For some reason I'd just assumed that files would also be aliased to http://www.example.com/files/filename so that if the directory were moved, it would be totally transparent to the user. I'd pictured Drupal loading to handle the alias. Thanks for setting me straight, Susan