Actually I think I've got this working, although I will take your regexp for the expires block into account.

server { listen 80; server_name test.com; index index.php; root /home/test/web/test.com/rfdev; rewrite /icommon/(.*) /common/$1 last; location /common { root /home/test/web/test.com/rfdev/core; location ~ \.php$ { fastcgi_pass 127.0.0.1:11004; } location ~* ^.+\.(jpg|jpeg|gif|css|png|js|ico|html)$ { expires max; } } location ~ \.php$ { fastcgi_pass 127.0.0.1:11004; } }