Template comments are surrounded by asterisks, and that is surrounded by the delimiter tags like so: {* this is a comment *} Smarty comments are NOT displayed in the final output of the template, unlike <!-- HTML comments --> and are useful for making internal notes in the templates. {* I am a smarty comment, I dont exist in the compiled output *} {* another single smarty line comment *} {* this multiline smarty comment is not sent to browser *} {* include the header file *} {include file='header.tpl'} {* Dev note: $includeFile is assigned in foo.php script *} {include file=$includeFile} {* this block is redundant *} {* {html_options options=$vals selected=$selected_id} *} ]]>