Chris Garrett has done something really cool with a WordPress installation. He's basically created a really slick, customizable shopping site that looks nothing like a WordPress blog.

The site I'm talking about is called CreditCardMatcher.com and if you visit it you will see a cool interactive search widget that helps people select the exact item they are looking for.

This cool feature is done completely through a custom WordPress plugin integrated with a WordPress page template. And each page that gets setup at the site uses custom keys to pull various combinations of data from the product database. For example, this page pulls all cards that meet two conditions: they must be shopping cards and they must offer a 0% rate on purchases.

I've gotta say that this is about the coolest use of WordPress I've seen in a long, long time. Very innovative. And I know that Chris has been knee deep in the code to get this worked out. Lots of elbow grease went into its development.

So, well done Chris. I think you have a success on your hands!

Performancing is pleased to announce the November Performancing WordPress Theme release: TDAge.

Another collaboration with Thord Daniel Hedengren, TDAge has many of the design elements common to Thord's creations, and you may be familiar with the bold header and title texts, the clean-cut archives/summary page, and navigation header.

From the Performancing WordPress Themes announcement:

A free, public release version of design guru Thord Daniel Hedengren’s Swedish-language blog, TDAge is a light-blue themed design with big, bold feed and “about” images, and large-font headers. TDAge also has easy access links to a blog’s pages and categories from the headers, and has a clean-cut pre-defined template for use as an archive summary page.

TDAge is a pun for TDH, which stands for–you guessed it!–Thord Daniel Hedengren, who has developed various designs for Splashpress Media, including the Blog Herald, Jack of All Blogs, Blog Network Watch, Blogger Jobs, Bloggy Award, Audival, Wisdump, Devlounge, and many more. Thord has also collaborated with us on other Performancing WordPress Theme releases: One in a Million and Estranged.

You can see a live demo of TDAge at the Performancing WordPress Themes blog. You can directly download the theme here. As with our other releases, we offer official support to the theme on the Performancing Community Forum.

WordPress 2.6.2 was released due to a weakness that has been discovered in something known as mt_rand(). WordPress 2.6.2 is a critical release for those of you who allow open registration on your blog. Here is the reason why:

With open registration enabled, it is possible in WordPress versions 2.6.1 and earlier to craft a username such that it will allow resetting another user’s password to a randomly generated password. The randomly generated password is not disclosed to the attacker, so this problem by itself is annoying but not a security exploit. However, this attack coupled with a weakness in the random number seeding in mt_rand() could be used to predict the randomly generated password.

Along with this critical fix, 2.6.2 is an interim release and therefor contains a few other bug fixes as well such as images that were always inserted into a post at full size, RSS widget linking if there isn't a link, and the inability to control where a user redirects to when they log in. You can view the rest of the bug fixes here (Fixed Bugs In 2.6.2).

I have already upgraded my blog without a problem!

Steve Smith who writes for Orderedlist.com has published the results of their recent Content Management Survey. Keep in mind when reviewing the data that OrderedList.com caters to Web designers and those are the folks who most likely responded to the survey.

Although there have been countless debates on whether WordPress is a CMS or not (See the comments of the survey to see another one), it topped the list for which CMS people used. This actually coincides with the results from our own poll on which self hosted publishing platform people used. Surprisingly, the choice of (Other) came in second, meaning there are either plenty of custom CMS's which people are using or, there are many content management systems that are still under the radar. ExpressionEngine took the third spot.

ExpressionsEngine took the cake as far as satisfaction level. WordPress contained a 41% Very Satisfied rating while all other systems equaled 43%. ExpressionEngine however, contained a whopping 64% Very Satisfied rating. ExpressionEngine is a paid for solution so it is easy to see why the satisfaction rating is so high. If you are going to pay for a CMS, it is likely due to the fact that it suits your needs. Thus, the higher satisfaction levels.

The survey also displays data on whether people prefer to host their own CMS or choose a hosted solution. Also noted at the end of the survey results was proof that designers are control freaks. No big surprise there.

It is obvious that the majority of publishers and bloggers are using WordPress. But my question is why?

WordPress is great and fits the bill for most people out of the box. However, there are plugins available which take WordPress to the next level in terms of publishing. Here are 12 of my favorite.

WP AJAX Edit Comments - Allows users and admins to edit comments on a post inline using AJAX.

WP Comment Remix - Adds much needed comment functionality to Wordpress such as the ability to reply to comments already made. Also has the ability to display a Quote link which allows users to easily quote each other when making a comment. Also provides functionality where you can reply to comments from the administration panel.

YACTP - Yet Another Comment Threading Plugin allows visitors to reply to existed comments and present them in a threaded fashion to make following multiple conversations easier.

All in One SEO Pack - Optimizes your Wordpress blog for Search Engines (Search Engine Optimization).

WP Super Cache - WP Super Cache is a static caching plugin for WordPress. It generates html files that are served directly by Apache without processing comparatively heavy PHP scripts. By using this plugin you will speed up your WordPress blog significantly.

Popularity Contest - Keeps a count of your post, category and archive views, comments, trackbacks, etc. and uses them to determine which of your posts are most popular.

Custom Query String - set the number of posts (custom queries) for every single page on your website like categories, archives, or search results pages.

KB Advanced RSS Widget - A WordPress widget that gives you complete control over how RSS feeds are parsed for your sidebar.

Share This - Lets your visitors add your post to various social bookmarking sites, or send a link via e-mail to a friend.

Vipers Video Quicktags - This plugin provides buttons to the visual editor which make it easy to embed videos from a myriad of different services. No more copy and paste of embedding code!.

AskApache Google 404 - Adds Intelligent SEO Ajax-powered Google Search to 404 pages

WP-Polls - Adds an AJAX poll system to your WordPress blog. You can easily include a poll into your WordPress’s blog post/page.

If you have a favorite plugin that you install on with every new WordPress installation, let me know about it in the comments.

WordPress 2.7, (Tentatively) scheduled for a November release looks like it is going to blow the pants off of us. Recently, I took the opportunity to download a developmental version of 2.7 and although it is very early in development, I really like what I've seen thus far. Some highlights worth noting:

The developmental version of WordPress 2.7 should not be used on a live blog as it is not considered stable.

Redesigned back end: Although 2.5 introduced a brand new administration panel for WordPress, 2.7 is going to include a new user interface which I believe many people will enjoy. I liken it to the WordPress 2.3 backend with the style of 2.5.

Revamped Write Panel: One of the biggest complaints from users in WordPress 2.5 was the inability to move things around in the Write panel. Thankfully, this is coming back with a few additions tacked on.

Browsing And Installing Plugins From The Back End: WordPress 2.7 has tied the plugin repository into the back end of WordPress. This means you'll be able to search, download and install plugins right from your installation of WordPress. How cool is that?

There are many other features which may or may not make it into the next version but so far, I have really enjoyed working with the new user interface. The navigational column on the left hand side of the page threw me for a loop for a little while but I have since come to enjoy the lack of vertical scrolling thanks to this column.

If you really want to get a detailed overview as to the changes found within 2.7 thus far, I suggest reading this post entitled (First Look At WordPress 2.7).

Tell me something, are you looking forward to 2.7?

That Buzz you hear is not coming from The Hive but instead, is the sound of Yahoo! Buzz opening up to the public. Yahoo! Buzz is a social news site like Digg where users can vote or in this case, Buzz items. Yahoo determines which topics people are searching for on their search engine and then they showcase the most popular stories within those topics on the buzz page where users can vote up or down.

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Longtime readers of Performancing will recognize the name, Nathan Rice. For those that don't, Nathan is a great WordPress theme designer. He also works for iThemes.com, a premium theme resource. Lets find out what Proximity has to offer.

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WordPress is known by many to provide SEO qualities right out of the box. Thanks to the clean code base, search engine spiders have an easy time crawling your archives, categories, and pages. However, thats not to say that the SEO qualities with which WordPress contains out of the box can not be improved upon. Here are some tips and tricks on how to boost your WordPress installations SEO.

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WordPress, creators of one of the most popular publishing platforms, has released an iPhone application that allows users to post content onto WordPress blogs by way of the iPhone. It is available on the 3G iPhone, first-generation iPhone, and iPod Touch. It is also free, and we all like free stuff. This really marks another forward step in mobile blogging technology.

WordPress.com and self-installed WordPress 2.5.1 or higher can take advantage of the WordPress iPhone application. You can embed pictures and do many other popular functions that is available on the web-based interface. Early reviews seem to give praise to the application, but one of WordPress's main competitors, TypePad (by the folks who brought you MovableType—Six Apart), has also created an iPhone application, which has been highly praised as well.

It would be very interesting to see how many people actually take advantage of the WordPress iPhone application. Perhaps WordPress will reveal some numbers in the future.

I still have a few questions: can anyone accurately type on the iPhone's keyboard, and will this be used for anything other than short blurbs on WordPress blogs?

There is a great FAQ available on the official site, but I guess you'll just have to try it for yourself.

I, unfortunately, cannot comment heavily on this, but if any of you have an iPhone, let us know if the WordPress iPhone application is any good.

Terri recently sent me an email and wanted to know some precautionary steps as well as advice on how to keep WordPress safe from being hacked. Terri also wanted to know the differences in security between a self hosted version of WordPress versus the security risks of using WordPress.com

I have been doing a lot of research about the pros/cons of different blogging platforms and CMS. At the same time, I have come across a lot of information related to WordPress sites being hacked and other security issues. When I read about the pros/cons of self-hosted vs hosted solutions for blogs, it is interesting that I don't read too much about security vulnerabilities being a huge disadvantage to using a self-hosted solution. How concerned should bloggers be about being hacked? Is the threat big enough for someone not to choose WP as a blogging platform or CMS? Besides backing up your database (which could be infected also) and upgrading WP to the most recent version, what other precautions should you take to keep a WP blog safe? Also, I heard that the upgrades that WP makes makes it more open to attacks. Your thoughts?

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The guys behind the WordPress project announced on July 18th that the new theme repository was online and operational. This brings a sigh of relief towards theme developers as they now have a central location to manage all of their themes.

I've been looking for a reason to publish my first screencast and the new theme repository fit the bill. I've embedded my first ever screencast which was produced within Camtasia Studio 5 exported as a .m4v file. As for the video host, I've chosen Viddler as they have in video comments as well as a nice upload/encode feature. I realize that I'm not the most articulate person and there are indeed a couple of points in the video where I screwed up, but I finally broke my video/screencasting cherry and it feels pretty good.

Please let me know what you think of this first screencast and let me know if you would like to see more of these in the future here on Performancing.

A Guided Tour Of The WordPress Theme Repository.

For those of you who have left comments on articles published here at Performancing.com, you'll already know that our commenting system is not the best. Although it has yet to be confirmed, there is a chance that Performancing will be moved over to WordPress. If this were to happen, here is the group of plugins I would use to provide Performancing.com with the ultimate WordPress commenting system.

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It's been quite awhile since anything has been posted on the plugins area of Performancing.com and I think it's time we change that. Sometimes, plugin developers need some ideas or inspiration to get them going and I'm hoping you'll provide those ingredients at the end of this post.

Here are the plugins we currently have available for download.

BlogNetworking Plugin: This plugin automatically creates a blogroll in the sidebar which will show the latest headlines from across a blog network. An excellent way to promote content within your network.

pMetrics WordPress PluginThis plugin ties directly into your pMetrics account, allowing you to view your blog stats right from your WordPress dashboard. This plugin packs quite a few features.

Now, as for the status of those two plugins in terms of which versions of WordPress they are compatible with and their future, I'll figure that out and let you know. But until then, please give us some of your ideas/requests for WordPress plugins you would like to see Performancing develop. Since a large majority of you are currently using WordPress, take this opportunity to tell us what you want and we'll see if we can fill that need.

As James mentioned just a few hours ago, the release of WordPress 2.6 appeared to be imminent. As I've just discovered, the dev team has released WordPress version 2.6 to the public. James has already covered the new features found within this new major release but Matt Mullenweg has published a video guided tour of the new version.

I've already upgraded my blog from WordPress 2.5.1 to 2.6 and didn't encounter any problems. With the new post revision system, how long do you think it will be before a cool Wiki type plugin emerges, which makes extensive use of the revision feature inside 2.6?