The Armory has been updated with Season 3 items and some other stuff...

• New Personal Arena Ratings appear in Character and Team Profiles. A given character can have up to three Personal Arena Ratings at one time – one for each team type. Personal ratings are used as the new basis of eligibility for certain Arena rewards (Season 3 shoulders and weapons), and end-of-season prizes such as special titles.
• The full set of Season 3 Arena rewards, consisting of the Vengeful Gladiator armor sets and weapons, are now in the Item Database.
• The full set of Vindicator’s honor rewards are now in the Item Database. These epic rewards are purchased with honor points and battleground Marks of Honor.
• The special Season 2 titles awarded to the top tier Arena teams should appear in Character Profiles if selected in-game.
• Season 2’s Hall of Fame: This archive commemorating the top teams of Season 2 should appear on the Armory soon.

• New Login-Protected Feature: Guild Banks
  
  
  
  • Guild members can view their Guild Bank contents and transaction logs on the first login-protected area of the Armory. The new Guild Bank pages require you to log in with your World of Warcraft account to access them. You must also have been granted the appropriate Guild Bank permissions by your guildmaster to view these pages. Find out more at our Login and Guild FAQs.
    

• Patch 2.3 Item Changes and Additions
  
  
  
  • The many new items included in the patch (including new Badge of Justice rewards) have been added to the Item Database, and existing items have had their tooltips updated to reflect the additions of Expertise Rating as well as the bonus spell damage derived from bonus healing effects.

Blizzard have released an Armory search plugin for Firefox and also a new Arena Calculator.

Check out the details after the jump!

Blizzard are making a Firefox search plugin for the Armory... it's being worked on and should be released soon.

It's actually being worked on at the moment, keep an eye on the armory page. It should be going up within a day or two.

The Armory has been updated and should be faster... the URL has also been changed.

• Smarter, faster results pages: The Armory’s various search results pages respond more quickly when changing pages or sorting within the results. The Armory’s right hand panel also takes advantage of this new speed and now remembers what page you were last viewing as well.
  
• Faster item tooltips: The tooltips that appear when mousing over items in a character profile or an item search results page are now much more responsive.
  
• Open Armory links in new windows/tabs: Now you can open links from the Armory in their own tabs or windows for quick comparisons between profiles, items, search results, and more.
  
• New advanced item search button: This button takes you to the Armory’s powerful advanced item search options and is located in a prominent, convenient location under the main search field.
  
• And much more: Many more specific improvements have been implemented, the details of which can be found on the Updates page. In addition, general performance has been greatly improved in the areas of response time, loading time, and memory usage.
  

Heres a cool tool that makes use of the Armory... you can now embed your Armory profile anywhere you wish!

The Armory basically won't run on my PC, and I wondered if anything was being done about it. Well apparently it is still in BETA status and Blizzard knows it runs like shit.

First, I hope you don't mind me saying that your choice of word to describe the Armory as "horrible" is a bit of an exaggeration don't you think? Your issue is the speed of the load not the actual use and functionality of the Armory so your title is overstated and misleading to what you feel the real issue is that is plaguing you.

The reason I point this out is because the Armory is still a work in progress and considered still in beta. By knowing what issues are prevalent in its use, it helps the web team track them down and hopefully get them resolved. It's important to be very clear about what issues people are having and what possible things could be causing them. We are most definitely continuing to collect feedback on the performance of the Armory as well as the features that people would like to see in the future so please feel free to do so.

Keeping the ctpfofiles site running is proving to be too much work for the lads, so they are throwing in the towel for now to work more on CTMod. They do say that a "2.0" version of ctprofiles is in the works though.

I'd like to start off by saying thank you to everyone that has helped us keep the site/servers up, bug tested, beta'd various features, or simply contributed to the community. We've spent the past 6 months fighting bug after bug after bug only to have even more bugs arise, without ever catching up.

It has finally got to the point where it's simply too much work to 'fix' things. With several offers of help, only a few minor things were ever completed, and leaving Cide as the only coder was just not enough to get out from the overwhelming load. We're not happy to see things not working, but it just isn't feasible to attempt to fix them.

We still feel there is a very viable use for a custom profiling site, even with the armory out. The armory can't help you compare your crafted set to tier4 or 5, nor your arena gear vs. misc. pieces. We've started a very early stage of development for a CTProfiles2.0 project, which is essentially a complete recode, however we won't be releasing it any time soon. Our focus is going to be shifted back to CTMod, and we'll be working on a new unannounced mod that's been in the works for a few weeks, CT_RaidAssist2.0, some fixes and updates to older mods, and we'll continue to go from there. As for development of the CTP2 site, I won't even set an estimate of when we'd be starting work on it again.
 

The Armory over at the official World of Warcraft site has been updated with a whole heap of new features and additions. WoW Insider have given us a nice run down on what most of them are.

Recently some new features were added to the Armory section of the World of Warcraft website. These changes were put up yesterday, and there is enough here that it's worth taking a second look at. There are lots of nifty new features that make this site a whole lot more useful to players. I can't say whether or not it is yet a contender to the database sites, but we're definitely getting there.

This is pretty funny, people complaining about the Armory again, this time for two reasons:

1. It allows people to see your spec and gear, which may not help you in PVP.
2. Guilds can see when you are lying about your spec or gear (some guy got kicked because he lied about his spec - haha!) 

Someone is complaining that there should be an option to opt out of the new Armory, which basically reveals everything to anyone about any character that someone has within the game.

He doesn't seem to have a lot of support though!