What's the best way to use CakePHP to control the Expires headers for image and CSS files?
My host unfortunately doesn't support mod_expires or mod_headers, so I can't simply set these values in an .htaccess file. Right now there's no cache control for my files and a lot of unnecessary requests are made.
What's the most elegant way to pipe requests for asset files through Cake and set the appropriate headers via header()?
I would suggest writing a helper which takes the filename and then returns a URL to a PHP script which fetches the file and adds the necessary header. You can see an example of a basic helper here: http://bakery.cakephp.org/articles/view/image-resize-helper
I guess the best, not even necessarily Cake-specific way, is to create a script in /webroot that adds the headers, then use .htaccess directives to pipe requests for ./css/* and ./img/* through that file. I was just hoping there might be some functionality like this built into Cake already. :)