second/overlay rails root directory ?

Hello Folks, is there a way to have rails look for files from 2 different root directories ?

Heres the scenario...

- we deploy our apps to lots of customers - they each have a few customizations (views, configs, css, etc) - I would like my rails to look for files like this

- first search RAILS_ROOT/overlay/customer1 - then search RAILS_ROOT like normal

so if nothing was in the overlay directory, all the files would come form RAILS_ROOT like normal - but if RAILS_ROOT/overlay/customer1/app/welcome/_message.rhml existed, it would use that

Or am I in left field here ?

This seems easy to do assuming rails finds files from one centralized place, then you could just add this functionality there.