The Eagle's Nest

About The Eagle’s Nest
The Eagle’s Nest has been pub­lished at Rhea County High School since 1996. Cur­rently, our print ver­sion is pro­duced by JS Print­ing in Birm­ing­ham, Al­abama. This is our first year on the Web, and we’re still find­ing our feet. Our site is hosted by Sur­pass Host­ing.

Web site de­tails
The Eagle’s Nest web site is pub­lished with Word­Press, us­ing a cus­tom theme. We’re us­ing the “mul­ti­ple loop” tech­nique on our front page to dis­play posts from the Fea­tures, Around School, Around the Web, and each of the Re­view cat­e­gories all at once.

Plu­g­ins used

• Ak­ismet
  Of course!
• Bet­ter Nearby Post Links
  This al­lows us to trun­cate post names in our sin­gle post page nav­i­ga­tion bars.
• Blog Icons
  Eas­ily adds a fav­i­con and iPod Touch/​iPhone icons.
• In­line Javascript Plu­gin
  Used to add Ama­zon code and other func­tion­al­ity to Re­view pages.
• Light­box 2
  Han­dles dis­play of en­larged pic­tures in in­di­vid­ual ar­ti­cle posts.
• More Fields
  Al­lows the ad­di­tion of cus­tom field data to posts; we’re mak­ing heavy use of this to add ex­tra data to posts—everything from source links for Around the Web ar­ti­cles to ASIN num­bers for book and CD reviews.
• Post Plu­gin Li­brary
  Needed for the Re­cent Com­ments plu­gin (below).
• Post Tem­plates by Cat­e­gory
  Used to en­able sep­a­rate tem­plates (with ex­tra info boxes) for book, mu­sic, and movie reviews.
• Re­cent Com­ments
  Highly con­fig­urable. Cre­ates the Re­cent Com­ments sec­tion on the front page.
• Role Man­ager
  On the back-​​end, al­lows very spe­cific cus­tomiza­tion of spe­cific user privileges.
• Se­cure and Ac­ces­si­ble PHP Con­tact Form
  An­other highly cus­tomiz­able plu­gin; runs on our Con­tact page.
• So­cia­ble
  Adds so­cial net­work site links to our sin­gle post pages.
• WP-​​Polls
  Man­ages our front-​​page polls.
• WP Grins Lite
  Click­able sm­i­lies for comments.
• WP Sta­tus No­ti­fier
  An­other ad­min tool; sends email no­tices to ed­i­tors when posts are sub­mit­ted “pend­ing review.”

Cus­tom plu­g­ins
We’re also us­ing a cou­ple of cus­tom plu­g­ins coded by one of our staff mem­bers, that help make it eas­ier to man­age con­tent on the back end:

• EN An­nounce­ments
  Han­dles an­nounce­ments on the front page; we can en­ter start­ing and end­ing dates so an­nounce­ments may be “cued up” in ad­vance, and dis­ap­pear au­to­mat­i­cally once the event is over. A %date% vari­able en­ables the an­nounce­ment text to change dy­nam­i­cally to re­flect things like “to­mor­row” and “today.”
• EN Sports Score­board
  Al­lows easy en­try of sports data that ap­pears on the front page.

Photo man­age­ment
The Pic­ture of the Day and other photo slideshow gal­leries are han­dled by Dominey Design’s SlideShow­Pro Flash Com­po­nent (for cre­at­ing the slideshow “plugs” for the dif­fer­ent pages) and SlideShow­Pro Di­rec­tor (for man­ag­ing pho­tos and cre­at­ing the slideshow con­tent). These tools are amaz­ingly af­ford­able, pro­vide pro­fes­sional re­sults, and are un­be­liev­able easy to use!

Pro­mo­tion ban­ners
Our “ad” ban­ners are man­aged with the free, open-​​source OpenX Ad Server. Cur­rently, we’re us­ing it to man­age ban­ners re­lated to school events, pub­lic ser­vice an­nounce­ments, and ex­per­i­ment­ing with se­lect advertisers.

More in­for­ma­tion?
Drop us a line!