Category setup and fetching CMS block from Custom Design template

Question

This Magento newbie is trying to create a new page layout and customization for level 3 categories. What I've done at this point is use the Custom Design tab to change the Page Layout to 1 column and call a template with the Custom Layout Update:

<reference name="series">
    <action method="setTemplate"><template>catalog/category/seriespage.phtml</template></action>
</reference>

In my page.xml files I have the block defined as "core/template".

But what I found is that in my template I could not access the category fields with $this - calls to $this->getName() and $this-getDescription() returned null. I finally was able to get them this way:

$category = Mage::getSingleton('category/layer')->getCurrentCategory();
$desc = $category->getDescription();  // The right stuff

However, the category ID is still unknown and not returned from a $category->getCategoryId() call as I think it should be. I see references to $this->getCategoryId() often.

Now I want to fetch the content of a CMS static block I've created, but this too seems to return null. Nothing is output from a statement such as:

Mage::app()->getLayout()->createBlock('cms/block')->setBlockId->('my-block')->toHtml();

Using $this instead of Mage::app() didn't work either of course, and I tried other Mage variations. I thought defining this template in Manage Categories would give it the proper context, but apparently not. What am I missing to get $this to be set to my category context so the typical function calls work?

Answer 1

please check that your template is loaded with some static content

if yes then you can try below code for that

$_current_category = Mage::registry('current_category');
echo $_current_category->getName();
echo $_current_category->getDescription(); 

But in your case I am pretty sure that for series block type is different please update your question with your block type for series if my solution wont work. I will update my answer accordingly