currently templates as used with the render method need to reside in the same directory as the calling gsp view. This limits the area of reusability of templates. RoR follows the following convention of shared templates ('partials'): '''' Shared Partial Page Templates If the :partial parameter to a render method call is a simple name, Rails assumes that the target template is in the current controller's view directory. However, if the name contains one or more / characters, Rails assumes that the part up to the last slash is a directory name and the rest is the template name. The directory is assumed to be under app/views. This makes it easy to share partials across controllers. The convention among Rails applications is to store these shared partials in a subdirectory of app/views called shared. These can be rendered using something such as <%= render(:partial => "shared/post", :object => @article) %> . . . In this previous example, the @article object will be assigned to the local variable post within the template. ''''