Relate Posts via Category

It’s been a while since I had a WP ran site. I remember I used to have a setup where I would have an if then php statement for single pages to display related category posts, I remember it got kind of cumbersome because I had to make an if then for every category.

I was wondering if there is a way to just auto-detect the category the single post is on and query related post that way. I know there are plug-ins for this, however I like to have control of how it’s displayed and often times you’re at the mercy who the plug-in developer of how the related posts are displayed, or you have to hack through code to make it look the way you want.

I figured with WP in it’s 3.0 version it should be doable… I hope. Anyways if you need any clarification, I’m more than willing to elaborate. Thanks.