Render from another path

[lakeweb]

I posted this in another thread but I think this is the right place with where I've gone...

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I started working with Joomla yesterday. I thought I would experiment with 'one install'. We have a dozen domains, much less subdomains. So far, just by hacking the index.php at:

define('JPATH_BASE', '/var/www/vhosts/lakeweb.net/httpdocs/jmla' );

I can get this:
http://lakeweb.net/test

Here is the real page:
http://lakeweb.net/jmla/
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Using 1.5

Since then I've worked my way down to:
JDocumentHTML::render where I've put:

It doesn't look it would be much to get the engine to put the proper links in. But I don't know as I've just started looking under the hood.

$directory is correct
/var/www/vhosts/lakeweb.net/httpdocs/jmla/templates

I can only see that the content is rendered here. If I comment load and parse, the style sheet links and such still make it to my browser.

Any Ideas?

Thanks, Dan.