title: Magento/Zend not allowing symbolic links
body: <p>Anyone know why Magento won't allow symbolic links for template .phtml files that are outside the app/design folder? </p>
  
  <p>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.</p>
  
  <p>Possibly a Zend setting? <a href="http://zend-framework-community.634137.n4.nabble.com/Zend-Tool-not-working-with-symbolic-links-in-include-path-td662569.html" rel="noreferrer">http://zend-framework-community.634137.n4.nabble.com/Zend-Tool-not-working-with-symbolic-links-in-include-path-td662569.html</a></p>
  
  <p>Anyone?</p>
  
  <p>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 <strong>Varien_Profiler::start($fileName);</strong> </p>
  
  <pre><code>    $storeId = Mage::app()-&gt;getStore()-&gt;getId();
      $theme = Mage::getStoreConfig('design/package/name', $storeId);
      Mage::Log($this-&gt;_viewDir.DS.$fileName); 
      $includes = $this-&gt;_viewDir.DS.$fileName; 
      if(strpos($includes, 'frontend/'.$theme )) { 
           include $this-&gt;_viewDir.DS.$fileName;
          };
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Using the IF statement here stops any base templates being doubled, and only allows your custom theme templates through. </p>