Don't see anything wrong with that personally. Then again, if I only needed a helper function on a single view, I've been known to create the function at the top of the view file and completely break the separation that should be there.
My tact lately, is a heavier use of objects. In a project I'm working on currently, I have a Album class that does nothing except represent a single album of music. It does, however, have a few helper methods like
image() and
imageURL().
When the model returns the $list (from your example) it returns an array of Track instances. These are passed directly to the view. Then, in the view, I just have to call the
imageURL() method. It's not quite the same thing you've done here, but pretty close in concept, since it will provided a default image if none exists.
