Style

It looks like this might be a bug in the plugin. You can get paragraphs to show up by writing your code like this:

<?php echo wpautop( $cat->description ); ?>

I hope that’s helpful.

It’s not a bug, it is default WordPress behavior. For posts you receive paragraphs (and all the goodies, like shortcodes) only after you put the content through a filter (that’s what the_content() tag does for you). You should filter the raw $cat->description the same way, invoking the filter directly for example:

<?php echo apply_filters('the_content', $cat->description); ?>

Probably I should outline this explicitly in the docs.

@jayarjo, sorry for calling it a bug. You’re definitely right. I guess my thinking was that since the purpose of the plugin is to allow category descriptions to use rich text that the filters would be applied by default. That said, applying filters by default would make it harder to remove them in case someone didn’t want them added.

Clarifying this in the documentation should do the trick for most users.

If you output it via recommended way (using term_description()) you get the filtered category right away. Not sure why @will_verstehen is trying to do it through the raw object field.