Adding a Custom Form Element to an Adminhtml Form

Question

Is there a way to add a custom form element to a Magento Adminhtml form without placing the custom element in the lib/Varian folder?

I\'ve tracked down the

Answer 1

Self help desk strikes again. It looks like Magento sets up include paths in such a way that you can drop class files from lib (not just from the Mage_ namespace) in your local code branch

app/code/local/Varien/etc

When the autoloader tries to load a lib/Varien class, it will check your directory first. This still puts you at risk if Varien ever creates a data element with the same name as yours, but as risks go it's relatively low.