Will commenting out lines to hide price in store affect updates?

Question

I wanted to remove the price of products from appearing anywhere on my site. I bought and installed a hide price extension which worked for the catalog and products pages but some products appeared on the home page still with the price. This was because the theme had a "product tabs" feature which displayed some products on the home page.

I went into various files in the following path "app/design/frontend/mytheme/template" and commented out the PHP code which things such as the price and the stock. Here is an example:

 <div class="actions">
                            <div class="link-actions">
                                <?php if($quick_view):?><a data-toggle="tooltip" href="<?php echo $this->getUrl('arexworks/quickview/index',array('product_id'=>$_product->getId()));?>" class="button link-quickview" title="<?php echo $this->__('Quick View') ?>"><span class="fa fa-search"></span></a><?php endif;?><?php /*
    */?><?php if ($_compareUrl = $this->getAddToCompareUrl($_product)): ?><a data-toggle="tooltip" href="<?php echo $_compareUrl ?>" class="button link-compare" title="<?php echo $this->__('Add to Compare') ?>"><span class="fa fa-retweet"></span></a><?php endif; ?><?php /*
    */?><?php if ($this->helper('wishlist')->isAllow()) : ?><a data-toggle="tooltip" href="<?php echo $this->getAddToWishlistUrl($_product) ?>" class="button link-wishlist" title="<?php echo $this->__('Add to Wishlist') ?>"><span class="fa fa-heart-o"></span></a><?php endif; ?>
                            </div>
                            <?php /*if($_product->isSaleable()): ?>
                                <button onclick="setLocation('<?php echo $this->getAddToCartUrl($_product) ?>')" class="button btn-cart" title="<?php echo $this->__('Add to Cart') ?>"><span><span><?php echo $this->__('Add to Cart') ?></span></span></button>
                            <?php else: ?>
                                <p class="availability out-of-stock"><span><?php echo $this->__('Out of stock') ?></span></p>
                            <?php endif; ?>
                            <?php if($_product->getRatingSummary()):?>
                                <?php echo $this->getReviewsSummaryHtml($_product, 'short') ?>
                            <?php else:?>
                                <div class="ratings">
                                    <div class="rating-box">
                                        <div class="rating" style="width:0%"></div>
                                    </div>
                                </div>
                            <?php endif;*/?>
                        </div>

My question is will doing this break my site if I perform Magento updates, say, a year from now? If so, is there a better way to prevent prices from appearing anywhere on my site?

I have seen various comments saying "never modify the core code" but I don't know if that extends to simply commenting out some PHP.

Any help would be appreciated!

Answer 1

Copying files from base/default into your own theme is like copying a file to code/local/Mage.

The old file is no longer used.

Compared to a rewrite this means, that you not only pin a single method to your own implementation but the complete file.

The implication is in frontend not that bad, and what you are doing is best practice! The only thin I can think of which was really bad about this was the introduction of form_keys which were added to the base templates, but not to your own (how should they ;-)).

Therefore: No worries, but keep an eye on the changelogs!

An alternative to this would be to copy price.phtml (the smallest part possible) and just clean it.