Paginate WordPress Category Pages

Question

I am using the following query on my category.php template:

<?php
    $paged = (get_query_var("paged")) ? get_query_var("paged") : 1;
    query_posts("posts_per_page=2&paged=".$paged);
?>

The one thing that I've noticed is that this breaks my pagination...with this code the pagination returns "paged" in the url: http://example.com/?cat=12&paged=2, fortunately or unfortunately it's a simple issue with the url...instead of returning "paged" in the url, it should return "page" or http://example.com/?cat=12&page=2.

I have tried altering my code (as explained: http://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference/get_query_var for pages):

<?php
    $page = (get_query_var("page")) ? get_query_var("page") : 1;
    query_posts("posts_per_page=2&page=".$page);
?>

But that doesn't work either...any ideas?

Thanks,
Josh

Answer 1

paged is correct unless you're using pretty permalinks, however, if you're just trying to alter posts per page for categories, you should be using the pre_get_posts action, there's no reason to use query_posts in the template:

function wpa85791_category_posts_per_page( $query ) {
    if ( $query->is_category() && $query->is_main_query() )
        $query->set( 'posts_per_page', 2 );
}
add_action( 'pre_get_posts', 'wpa85791_category_posts_per_page' );