List and Order Category Posts

Hi all,

I’ve read most of the post in the forums regarding listing and order posts and nothing seems to be working. I’d like to build my site with a sidebar that lists only the posts from that specific category. Category 1, which loads from “index.php” and not a “category-xxx.php” template file works fine;

http://theomcmurray.com/portfolio/?cat=1

But when I try to build a category template page and change the query string to match that specific category, it won’t work.

http://theomcmurray.com/portfolio/?cat=4

I’m using this; <?php query_posts(‘cat=1&showposts=18’); ?> in “sidebar.php” to list the posts.

Does anyone have an example “category-xxx.php” page that I can look at that does something similar?

A separate but possibly related issue is that, I’ve tried order my posts using “AStickyPostOrderER” “Category Posts Widget” as well as a few other plugins suggested in the forums. None seem to work, I’ve switched my themes back to classic and default to see if it that was the problem but I still wasn’t able to change the order. Could this be a WP 2.6 issue? Has anyone else been able to use the plugins above with this latest version?

Thanks in advance.