I am trying to mix categories, pages and posts to form up a portal-like site. Something that seemed out to be pretty impossible until I found the plugin.

 The topmost sections of my site are represented by pages. So after installing the plugin I first assigned my top pages to the proper categories. Each of the top pages queries posts within the $cat category, which sould in theory return the posts assigned to the same category. And the sub-navigation uses wp_list_categories with child_of $cat to list subcategories within the category. And that’s where I noticed it just does not work - the $cat does not return anything. So instead of getting list of posts within the category I get a totally messed list of posts and the list of categories mixes up all categories of the same level and their subcategories. And it does not make difference whether I use $cat in the loop or not. So I started thinking - is it a bug in the plugin, or WordPress just can’t handle the idea of pages being assigned to categories and calling the $cat identifier. I thought the plugin might come up with a function that returns the ID of the current category instead of $cat, but as it seems it does not. So any ideas what the possible cause and fix might be? Thanks in advance.

AFAIK $cat is the general WordPress variable that should return the category current post is placed under.

Andy, quick reference on $cat 

http://wordpress.taragana.net/_variables/cat.html

in core wp, pages dont have categories, so I would imagine that variable is empty 

Oh yes - $cat is a common variable used within the core. I was realy asking how it was exposed in a theme template. It’s only going to be available by using some function or other and that’s the important bit really.

But thanks for the list. That’s a useful resource! You certanly know you’re way around!

As far as I can see $cat is only ever defined as a global in the function category_description() although I may well have missed it elsewhere. I rather think that;s a bit odd as well as it serves no purpose.

Of course creating a variable to hold the cat(s) is not difficult but as to the original question I would very much like to see how it is being done.

I am trying to explain something utterfly difficult and complex (IMO) with my poor English, so I am sorry about that.

Basicaly the site structure looks like this:

Pages (assigned to categories)
- Posts (assigned to subcategories in the respective page category)

So my category structure looks like:

Resources
- Articles
- Press release
- News

and I have a page called Resources assigned to the resources category, and posts in Articles, Press release and News. I thought that would be the most convenient way for me to organize pages and posts.

As my PHP skills are close to zero, I am mostly trying to solve my problems just testing different ways. I am using WP as CMS platform for lots of projects and I have some skills already, but this project is something different.

In this case my loop in the page looks like this (pretty standard):

And my sidenav (that should display subcategories for the category where the page is assigned), looks like this:

… but it always returns just the first category subcategories.

Now when I think of it, you will probably be able to get the whole picture if I just send you the page template instead?

OK…. So problem solved yes?