Not really sure if you have got your answer by now. As the post is kinda old, I should assume so.
Whenever a wordpress page is visited on your website, some variables are used to query the database so it can generate the page content. There’s a nice way to check the variables in a particular page.
Just add the line:
var_dump(wp_query->query_vars);
This will display the array of variables on that particular page so you can find out which ones you need to retrieve using something like:
$variable = get_query_var('variable_name');
In your particular case, to retrieve the category ID, you should use the variable called ‘cat’.
It would look like this
$cat = get_query_var('cat');
After storing the category ID to your variable called ‘$cat’, just add it to your quuery. Here is the code…
$featuredPosts1->query('cat=' . $cat .'&posts_per_page=10&meta_key=_my_key&orderby=meta_value&order=desc&paged='.$paged);
Not sure if that’s what you were looking for, but I think it might be of some help to someone.
