South African startup WooThemes has acknowledged that it has been hacked. According to memeburn.com, the premium WordPress developer released a statement today where it confirmed that it was the victim of a “very malicious & severe hack, which has been the reason for WooThemes.com being offline for this time.”

Co-founder Adriaan “Adii” Pienaar assured users that despite possible user account data loss, any credit card information is safe. WooThemes has stated that any future product development has been stopped and all effort is concentrated on fixing any damaged caused by the intrusion.

The company was bringing is about $2 million in sales as of 2010 and had over 50,000 paying costumers. It’s biggest product was the WordPress plugin WooCommerce which let users turn their WordPress site into an e-commerce site, allowing users to customize a micro-economy in their site, with the ability to track sales modify shipping rates.

WooThemes will update customers via its blog over the coming days and weeks.

WooThemes powered the Bvents Blast Magazine events calendar. As a precaution, we have taken the calender site down and have decided to seek alternate software to power it in the future.

We never realize how much effort we put into our digital lives. Think about how many times you tweet about your horrible public transportation experience, update your Facebook status to tell everyone about your appearance in the Boston Globe, Tumble about that sweet volcano picture you found, or blogged about your teenage anxiety. Ok, so the vast amount of data you’re creating on the Internet may not add up to much of substance, but to you, it’s a very personal history of what you’ve done, where you went, and on some level, who you are. And what happens if that data disappears?

Sure, backups will protect you, right? Technical errors in this day and age are at least uncommon due to redundant servers and offsite backups, but they’re still not unheard of. Delicious competitor Ma.gnolia experienced a massive database corruption last February, and users forever lost all of their saved links overnight. On the other hand, human error ended up labeling every site on Google’s searches “" even their own homepage “" as potentially malicious. Can you imagine if an earthquake were to tear though Netflix’s California data center erased your history there, forcing you to go though and rate the thousand movies you’ve seen over the last few years and rebuild your carefully curated queue ?

What would happen if your blog were to disappear overnight? We have a blog that we used to attend to daily in high school, and while we’ve certainly moved past it, it’s always fun to go back and remember the times when we would post horrible pictures of our friends as an “idiot of the week.” To borrow the analogy of our forever techno-geek crush Gina Trapani, the potential loss of an online blog is almost akin to someone burning your diary.

But on top of accidental loss, there’s the planned destruction of your digital data. Remember a few years ago when your Facebook wall was a highly editable wiki? And then do you remember when it disappeared overnight? We know we wish we could go back in time and look at it one last time, but alas, it is gone forever. Or what if you use an online backup service that decides to shutter its doors? You could very well be out of luck.

Likewise, Twitter’s system is set up only to hold 3200 tweets per user. Come tweet number 3201, and tweet numero uno is gone forever, and no amount of searching or API hacking will bring it back. In era of near infinite email storage, the fact that Twitter keeps only the equivalent of 3200 text messages is, quite frankly, absurd. We send and receive twice that every month, and our iPhone happily keeps track of every single one. Luckily, with some command line-fu, you can back up your Tweets if it’s that important to you, but in the case of your Facebook history, and many other sites, that’s mostly gone forever.

Either way, until site developers allow us a simple way to backup the data we’ve imputed to a website, the moral of this story is backup, backup, backup. Obviously you know to keep your Time Machine updates frequent or just to copy your files to an external every now and then, but now, you need to make sure to add your online data to that list as well, lest you lose something infinitely more personal to you than the pdf of your tax return from last year.

Automattic, the company behind WordPress, has purchased the advanced next-generation web commenting system IntenseDebate for an undisclosed sum.

This is a big move for WordPress, which has been looking for a new commenting system for a while and seems to have found it finally.

In a blog post on their website, IntenseDebate describes the deal and what it means for the product.

1. We will be temporarily going back into private beta. This won’t affect our current users, but new installs will require an invite code. This is just to give us a little time to ramp up the hardware and get our ducks in a row as we join the Automattic team.

2. You’ll be seeing IntenseDebate a lot more often. We’re really excited about the distribution possibilities this opens up, so expect to see our comment system and use your IntenseDebate profile on a lot more blogs.

3. You can look forward to tighter integration with some of the other Automattic joints including‚ Akismet‚ and‚ Gravatar.

The next major release of WordPress, version 2.7, will be the first implementation of the popular blogging and content management system to incorporate the IntenseDebate features, which include threaded commenting, user reputation, comment analytics and better administrative tracking of comments than WordPress’ current system.

WordPress is the system that powers Blast Magazine.

When WordPress 2.7 is released, we will first install it on a test server, then begin to integrate it into our outside blogs first, testing for bugs and incompatibilities with Blast-specific features like our custom popup galleries, before we install it on the main magazine.

The WordPress Development Blog announced Wednesday that the second release candidate for the upcoming WordPress 2.5 is available for immediate download.

The developers also release a video screencast as a sneak peak of what users can expect with 2.5.

“2.5 is coming along thanks to the fantastic feedback you guys provided on RC1 (over 580 pingbacks and counting),” said WordPress developer Matt Mullenweg “We’re now ready to show you a bit more of a peek with a short screencast covering the new dashboard and uploader and Release Candidate 2.”

WordPress is the software that powers BlastMagazine.com.

One of the major additions to WordPress 2.5 is the gallery feature. Which will be the first attempt by the popular blogging and content management platform at a built-in photo gallery system. Plugins and third party services like Flickr had been used by many users in the past.

In our own case, we built a gallery module and will continue to use it, but Blast will also look carefully at the new WordPress gallery. We see applications in bulk video game screenshots and art galleries.

WordPress 2.5 was supposed to be released several weeks ago, but it suffered development delays.