what page are you planning to display the stories.
first you'll need to get the category id.
select category_id from categories where category_safe_name = 'pligg'
once you have the category id you can find all the stories
PHP Code:
$links = $db->get_col("select link_id from links where link_category=$category_id order by link_votes desc");
if($links){
$story = new Link;
foreach($links as $link){
$story->id = $link;
$story->read();
}
}
the read will retrieve all the story data, and you can assign the values to smarty.
maybe if you can say more about what the page is, i can give you some code snippets to play with