{html_image}

{html_image} is a custom function that generates an HTML tag for an image. The height and width are automatically calculated from the image file if none are supplied.

Attribute Name	Type	Required	Default	Description
file	string	Yes	n/a	name/path to image
height	string	No	actual image height	height to display image
width	string	No	actual image width	width to display image
basedir	string	no	web server doc root	directory to base relative paths from
alt	string	no	""	alternative description of the image
href	string	no	n/a	href value to link the image to
path_prefix	string	no	n/a	prefix for output path

basedir is the base directory that relative image paths are based from. If not given, the web server document root ( env variable DOCUMENT_ROOT) is used as the base. If $security is enabled, the path to the image must be within a secure directory.

href is the href value to link the image to. If link is supplied, an <a href="LINKVALUE"><a> tag is placed around the image tag.

path_prefix is an optional prefix string you can give the output path. This is useful if you want to supply a different server name for the image.

All parameters that are not in the list above are printed as name/value-pairs inside the created <img> tag.

Technical Note: {html_image} requires a hit to the disk to read the image and calculate the height and width. If you don't use template caching, it is generally better to avoid {html_image} and leave image tags static for optimal performance.

Example 8-9. html_image example

where index.tpl is:
-------------------
{html_image file="pumpkin.jpg"}
{html_image file="/path/from/docroot/pumpkin.jpg"}
{html_image file="../path/relative/to/currdir/pumpkin.jpg"}

possible output would be:

<img src="pumpkin.jpg" alt="" width="44" height="68" />
<img src="/path/from/docroot/pumpkin.jpg" alt="" width="44" height="68" />
<img src="../path/relative/to/currdir/pumpkin.jpg" alt="" width="44" height="68" />