Thanks for the response. Sometimes just knowing that it should work is more than half the battle.
I played around with it some more. It was ordering things by post id not title. Couldn’t figure out why and eventually tried changing the order of the other items.
I couldn’t get it to work like this
[catlist id=1 orderby=title order=asc class=articles-list]
but when I changed it to
[catlist orderby=title order=asc id=1 class=articles-list]
it worked just fine.
on a separate note, I’m actually running this in an archive.php page (don’t ask) ??
but in case anyone’s ever interested in doing such a thing, here’s the code I used.
<?php $whatsthecatid = get_query_var('cat');
echo do_shortcode("[catlist orderby=title order=asc id=" . $whatsthecatid . " class=articles-list ]"); ?>