Needing to extend Rails view path

By default, I believe ActionView only looks in the ‘views’ folder for any templates and/or partials, which makes sense. But what if I have a bunch of static partials (not related to a specific controller) that I didn’t want cluttering my ‘views’ directory? How could I extend the view path to realize an additional directory? Lets say, ‘lib/content’ or ‘public/content’? Or what about another computer entirely?

Here’s my situation: I have to work with some “published” content (which is no more than a strict folder structure with embedded HTML files), and allow a user to navigate through that content. I can’t change what needs to be done, but I do have a little control over the filenames that get published. I thought I could publish them in the _partial.rhtml format, and in my application, deal with the directory hunting to find what I need, rendering each partial accordingly. For very valid reasons, I’m unable to modify the system that publishes the content any further than the filenames, so I have to work within the given constraints.

The published content has potential to get rather large, so I’d like it separate from my ‘views’ directory. Plus, it has nothing to do with my application; it’s just static content I need to read in. Ideally, I’d like to be able to reference a directory on another server (which seems like a lot to ask); but I could tolerate having a ‘public/content’ folder. Any thoughts on how to add another directory to the view path in order to make something like render :partial => "public/content/partial" become an option?