Trouble adding /pma location to all virtual hosts

[Ben Johnson]

I was able to accomplish my objective with some help from the tutorial
at:
http://www.howtoforge.com/running-phpmyadmin-on-nginx-lemp-on-debian-squeeze-ubuntu-11.04

location /pma {
   root /var/www/;
   index index.php index.html index.htm;
   location ~ ^/pma/(.+\.php)$ {
       try_files $uri =404;
       root /var/www/;
       fastcgi_pass unix:/var/run/php5-fpm.sock;
       fastcgi_param HTTPS on;
       fastcgi_index index.php;
       fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $document_root$fastcgi_script_name;
       include /etc/nginx/fastcgi_params;
   }
   location ~* ^/pma/(.+\.(jpg|jpeg|gif|css|png|js|ico|html|xml|txt))$ {
       root /var/www/;
   }
}
location /PMA {
       rewrite ^/* /pma last;
}

I don't know if the key is the nested location block, or something else.
If anyone is able to point-out the fundamental differences between the
configuration snippet that I posted previously and the snippet above,
which actually works, I would be most appreciative.

Thank you!

-Ben