[geckoday]

Sounds like you have something custom going on here. You really shouldn't try to do this in Smarty, it should be done by the PHP that is providing the $parts array to your template.

If you look at product.php you'll see that it uses func_select_product to get product information into an array before making it available to the product.tpl template. func_select_product uses func_get_image_url to turn the image file name in the database into a real URL.

It would be best if your custom code did the same thing - use func_select_product to get product data so that all of the array elements work just like you are used to in the stock templates.