opinion and best practices requested concerning override functionality

[Francis M]

We inherited a PrestaShop site with a lot of issues which all appear to stem from multiple overrides.

At first glance and being new to PS,  the override directory seems to be a pretty dangerous animal and causes a lot of complications with maintaining a site with multiple modules.

Why do some themes and modules request manual editing of files in the overrides directory?  Is that normal? 

... And why do some modules automatically try to edit, append and otherwise alter existing files in the override directory when activated?  I'm just curious what current module developers think about this.

If I disable all overrides in the admin, do individual modules start using their own override files that were distributed with the module?  

I'm just getting my feet wet with PS, and I'm curious what some of the common practices are with module development?  This would help me proceed with assessing the state of our current site.

I hope that this isn't too broad of a question to ask, but my initial experience with PS has been tainted by the override directory.

 

Edited July 6, 2022 by Francis M (see edit history)

[Daresh]

It is a broad topic indeed...

Current best practice is to try to avoid overrides as much as possible and actually more and more of the core code cannot be overriden any more. Instead it's recommended to use hooks, if only one is available.

An override may be necessary if you want to change something about the core, if you turn off overrides the modules will not be using the ones in their folders but simply not function properly.