I ran into this problem on the Stearns events and recipes pages, which both use custom templates pulling in posts from a particular category. We use the query_posts() function on those pages. The next_posts_link() and previous_posts_link() functions are used on normal multi-post pages to navigate through more items than appear on one page. Using the query_posts() function without the paging, such as:
query_posts("cat=4&limit=5")the paging doesn’t work at all: It just shows the same results for each page. To get this to work, you must tack on the “paged” parameter with the “$paged” wordpress php variable, like:
query_posts("cat=4&limit=5&paged=".$paged)and pagination will work just fine. You can only do this for one set of items, but you’d want to break out to a separate page for multiple anyway.