Awesome ty so much
I ended up making the call to Categories.getCategoryTopics() but I may switch back to the method you posted above

I'm using the following code to pull back a category by id. When I use the the api url in a browser topics are included but not when using this method. Am I missing a required piece of data?

//get category by id
Categories.getCategoryById({cid: category_id,uid: 0},function(err,res){
  if(err){
    console.log(err)
    cb(null, data)
  }
  category = res
  callback()
})

Can someone give me an example of how to access what skin the user has selected and apply that to a widget's template?

I have a widget that I would like to modify to be aware of the users selected skin if possible.

@Nicolas I can't seem to get this working on my 1.4.5 install. I get a 404 for the ACP template:

404 NOT FOUND
Route	Count
/assets/templates/admin/plugins/custom-fields.tpl	1

UPDATE:
Had to do a ./nodebb build after install and now it is showing up! Thanks!

Wow just found this myself if anyone else is looking to do this.

This data is stored on the Category object. Just replace the category # with your category:

db.objects.find(
{ _key : "category:#"} )
.pretty();

Next you can use the update() method to change the values to match.

db.objects.update(
{ _key : "category:#" },
{ $set : { "topic_count" : numberofTopics } }
);

Short of it is that I imported a db from discourse and I went in to mondgo to get ride of the "About blah blah category" posts. The posts are now deleted but the topic and post count are wrong (generally one more than actually exist). How is the topic and post count calculated? Can I get nodebb to recalc these? I've tried reset / reload and restart.

Has this been updated for nodebb v1.x.x ?