Where should a site's assets go in a MVC website?

Question

Examples given are from Kohana 3, but the question is not limited to the framework.

I've always put my assets in a file structure like this

application
  - classes
  - views
assets
  - css
  - js
  - swf
  - images
    -- layout
    -- content
system
  - classes

I've started reading a few forums where people always mention their assets files are placed in the views folder. This makes a lot of sense to me as these files are tied to the views quite closely (being included by markup). Plus, it will unclutter the docroot.

What is the preferred location of a site's assets? If I do place them under an views/assets folder, where should the actual template files go... under a separate folder like views/templates ?

Answer 1

For ASP.NET MVC

The project template gives you the folders ~\Content and ~\Scripts with the latter containing JQuery.

Why not follow this model, adding additional folders below these if they would otherwise get too many items.

I would stick to the project template unless there is a very good reason to override it (and also override the logic to find views and controllers).

Answer 2

I tend to place mine in the web root (wherever that's defined by the framework) so that I can reference /assets/img/myimage.jpg (or an analogous CSS/JS file, etc.). As Richard suggests, though, I do this because I'm sticking to the framework convention. I'm not familiar with Kohana, but the frameworks I've used extensively all place assets in the web root by convention.