Magento - get current product

Question

I have a sidebar block in my layout that is being displayed on different pages.

In this block I have a list of products, and I want to select the current product when I

Answer 1

If you're not willing to use your own block class inheriting from Mage_Catalog_Block_Navigation, in which you could set your own cache informations (to make it eg depending on the current product), you can get rid of the cache for your block by using this in its layout definition :

    cache_lifetime