G'day, I've never worked with Magento before, so forgive my bull-in-a-china shop blundering. I've been asked to replace the SKU with the items unit price in the order confirmation email, and after some googling, have found this howto :

Add Unit Price To Order Email Template

Which is pretty close, it leaves the Sku in and adds an extra column, that's just HTML tables and I think I get that.

BUT

Is this the right way to do it? Reading through other howtos on how to muck about with order PDF's suggests that you should not go editing the base templates and code, but should instead use a local override in the app/code/local tree

Is that the case for this modification, is editing these files :

app/design/frontend/base/default/template/email/order/items.phtml app/design/frontend/base/default/template/email/order/items/order/default.phtml app/design/frontend/base/default/layout/sales.xml

The right way? Or am I creating a maintenance disaster?

Magento 1.9