Am sure this is a basic problem that is very easy to understand and get working but I am in stupid mode. Basically - I am changing elements of my templates but they are not changing in my front end pages? Can anyone tell me why?

Many thanks

nb: have cleared cache as well as history etc of browser and rebuilt db but nothing changes - even if i check it in a browser that has not seen the site yet it seems to be pulling the content info from somewhere else

BTW - the info that i am changing is static footer info.

Thanks swaiba
I kind of fixed it - as unexplained as it appears - i deleted the <% include Footer %> element from my page.ss, saved and refreshed the page in the browser then popped it back in and low and behold it re-appeared with my changes there. (FYI) I cleared the cache via the default "clear recent history" (i am testing in FF). Thanks for the advice - will try your method on my next change if the problem persists

PS: Am still wrestling with the MAMP problem we discussed a few days ago - thanks for your help there too ;)

Changes to my Includes/Header.ss weren't working and doing the above still didn't clear the cache. This worked:

1 - copying to my desktop then removing the entire Includes folder from the server
2 - running /dev/build?flush=all
3 - manually removing all the files in the silverstripe-cache folder
4 - visiting the home page of the site with ?flush=1
5 - copying from the desktop to the server the entire Includes folder
6 - running /dev/build?flush=all
7 - manually removing all the files in the silverstripe-cache folder
8 - visiting the home page of the site with ?flush=1

I hadn't made changes to the SS files for several months, and it was a surprise to run into this issue where my simple change didn't get picked up. However, before I made my change to the Header.ss, I did a "duplicate" of the templates folder with my ftp client. Right after doing that my ftp client could not do a chmod to the templates folder, displaying an infrequent error the folder could not be found. Perhaps my ftp client changed a permission or something like that to mess things up.

SS is great. After hundreds of hours with Drupal and Joomla, SS is sane and has a great community. Thank you.

This was driving me mad but the ?flush at the end of the url did the trick. Like:
http://localhost/?flush
in the case of the home page.

Dev mode should mean dev mode, no cache, not anywhere not ever.