I have tried searching in the forums for a possible solution, but most posts seem to focus on “Unable to Write File” related errors.  My problem is that I am able to generate and edit template files but these edits don’t take effect with the live site.  I am not employing caching, file permissions are setup correctly, the new content even appears when I “view” the template file the traditional way within the Control Panel.

This may be my fundamental misunderstanding, but you should not have to go in and “update” a template within the Control Panel every time you wants these changes to take effect, right?  If anyone has any thoughts, or if I missed any relevant posts on here, any help would be greatly appreciated.

Solution
This was an (now) obvious mistake on my part, but I think it’s useful to have the solution up here if anyone encounters this problem.  Full server paths is a must, and even though it said this in the instructions I inadvertently used relative paths.  This will appear to function correctly until you want Expression Engine to start using those files to feed the live site… and then nothing will update.  So in case anyone comes across this problem down the road, you must use “/home/public/files” or whatever the absolute path to your template file folder.  Look in the System Preferences area for the particular setup in your server environment.