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before making any theme related changes, you'll want to disable smarty template caching for the theme. To do so, go to Preferences -> System -> General Settings and turn on the setting:
"Update module template .html files from themes/your theme/templates directory?"
Turn this setting back off once you're done modifying your theme.
Since you have already made the changes to your theme, you can clear the smarty template cache by removing all files from the /templates_c folder. When you reload a page in your site, smarty will re-compile all necessary templates.