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!