i'm responsible for a small WordPress/gallery hosting portal and i was wondering what are the most recommended add-ons or should i say, plugins or themes to use with a plain vanilla WordPress install? for now, i have these:
SpamKarma, Theme Switcher
any advice would be much appreciated. :)
Those are two great choices. I'd add:
Search Hilite
(It comes with WordPress.)
"When someone is referred from a search engine like Google, Yahoo, or WordPress’ own, the terms they search for are highlighted with this plugin."
WP-Contact Form:
http://ryanduff.net/wp-plugins/wp-contactform/
"Embeds a contact form for use on a WordPress page."
and Entity2NCR:
http://guff.szub.net/entity2ncr
"It converts various HTML character entities (» & © and so on) to their numeric equivalents."
(It's not necessary, but helps to make sure that the HTML is kosher and validates.)
You may also want to consider Spam Nuker: http://www.chrisjdavis.org/2005/03/05/spam-nuker-151/
Spam Nuker allows the user to either permanently delete or recover any comments left in the WordPress database and tagged as [spam]. These [spam] comments include (but are not limited to) those automatically "deleted" by matching words in the Comment Blacklist and those automatically "deleted" by the recent version of Spam Karma.