[development] Defining additional search paths for modules?

[Justin Davis]

Hello All.

My apologies if this belongs in "support" rather than "development".

I am managing a multi-site drupal installation and would like to be able to offer groups of modules to a sub set of our sites without having to have them installed in each sites/sitename/modules folder.

Basically, there are some advanced and developer modules that my more adept users need but that I would rather not be available to some of our novice site managers.

Ideally, I would be able to define something in the settings.php that told drupal to look in:

    sites/all/modules
    sites/all/modules_advanced
    sites/sitename/modules

The only possible solution that I've found would be to create a custom module that defined it's own "module_rebuild_cache" (maybe "extra_module_rebuild_cache" or such) that used a slightly modified "drupal_system_listing" that would be able to look outside of "sites/all/modules" and "sites/sitename/modules"

Does this make sense? Has anyone else come across a similar issue?

Thank you kindly,
Justin Davis
Liberal Arts ITS
University of Texas at Austin