Thanks to John Long, Rails now supports multiple view paths for each controller. For 90% of the apps, this probably won’t make a huge difference. But, for those of you wanting to productize various open source apps, you can now do this:
/beast/trunk$ mkdir vendor/plugins/test_view_paths
/beast/trunk$ cd vendor/plugins/test_view_paths
/beast/trunk/vendor/plugins/test_view_paths$ mkdir views
/beast/trunk/vendor/plugins/test_view_paths$ echo “ActionController::Base.view_paths.unshift File.join(directory, ‘views’)” > init.rb
What you’ve done is created a minimal rails plugin that inserts a ‘views’ directory in the plugin to the beginning of the #view_paths array. Now, copy a view from the rails app into the plugin’s ‘views’ directory, make a noticeable change, and start your app. You’ll notice that it picked your plugin’s view over the application’s view.