Filter channel entries tag by category url title

Question

Articles on my site are structured as /[category_url_title]/article/[article_url_title].

Now, I want to have at the bottom of my articles a section that says "related articles", and then list a few more articles from the same category. I have the same template for all articles.

This works perfectly fine:

{exp:channel:entries category="100" limit="3" dynamic="off" url_title="not {segment_3}"}
{title}<br>
{/exp:channel:entries}

But I need the category parameter to be set dynamically from {segment_1} which is the category's url title. However, the channel:entries tag will only accept category id, not category url title as a parameter.

I have cat2 installed, but this doesn't work:

{exp:channel:entries category="{exp:cat2:id category_url_title='{segment_1}'}" limit="3" dynamic="off" url_title="not {segment_3}"}
{title}<br>
{/exp:channel:entries}

I've also tried saving the value of the cat2 tag output as a php variable, but that doesn't work either.

I assume my above efforts don't work because of mixed parse order of EE. So how can I make this work?

Answer 1

If you want to parse a plugin as a parameter, you need to set the parameter parse as inward.

{exp:channel:entries parse="inward" category="{exp:cat2:id category_url_title='{segment_1}'}" limit="3" dynamic="off" url_title="not {segment_3}"}
  {title}<br>
{/exp:channel:entries}

Since different categories on different groups can share the same name, is a good idea to specify the category_group parameter on the cat2 add-on.

One more thing. The values of the parameter dynamic should be yes or no.