Thanks for the advice guys. Amit, yeah I should have mentioned that I totally agree that django shouldn't serve static files in a production environment. And keeping a /static/ directory sounds like a pretty good way to do that.
I started writing something more like Andy's #2 suggestion... a way to abstract the media root so it doesn't have to be hardcoded all over my templates. I made a tag to generate static URLs, and hacked the django code in order to remember a template's application's settings like the location of the media directory (if the template belongs to a application, that is). It works really well but I imagine there are various kinds of issues to consider for a facility like that. And you're right Andy, it's not really a ideal solution unless all the apps you're using use it. Well, it sounds like the dev team has their hands full right now with more important things like magic-removal and 1.0, but maybe I'll float this idea after that. Mostly I just wanted to make sure I wasn't high or completely missing the point.
