By the way, regarding using “the PHP comment function” you mentioned,
all I was able to find was e.g.,

$dom = new DOMDocument();
$comment = $dom->appendChild(new DOMComment(
‘This is the ‘. basename(__FILE__). ‘ file – it goes here.’));
echo $dom->saveHTML();

which will make

(!–This is the bla.php file – it goes here.–>

To include files within a WordPress Theme, you simply use the PHP include. If you want to comment within a template file so the words do not appear for the reader to see but leave a comment to explain instructions or guides, then you use the PHP comment function, which allows you to leave notes like “this is the header file – it goes here.” While the feature you mention allows people to put the name of the file in a comment, that only serves one purpose, which can be done manually, with less work. If there are dozens of files within a Theme, this is a handy bit of code, but few WordPress Themes have more than a dozen files.

Thanks for the tip, though, and the hard work.

At the top of this article, note the word “header” of “header begins”
and “header ends”,

If you replace that word with

(?php echo basename(__FILE__); ?)

PHP will insert the name of the file (“header” in this case) for you,
without one needing to type it in.

That way one can just paste the same HTML comment line at the top and
bottom of each file, and have PHP do the work of telling you what file
it was in!

It might look a little longer than the original, but it saves some
work!

I hope my tip helps somebody. Note the outer parentheses need to be
changed to angle brackets.

Now in my browser clicking ‘view HTML source’ I will see
(!-- The following output was made by template happy.php -->
(!-- The following output was made by template groovy.php -->
etc. (Change “(” to angle bracket.)
I hope this also explains my 2005/09/18/wordpress-tips-and-tricks-for-template-files comments.