Today we're launching improvements to the News Management feature of the PAS Content Management System (CMS).

When you create a news post, the PAS system will use the post's subject to automatically generate an SEO friendly URL.

We have changed the News Management page to display the generated URL and to include direct links to the post page. The table displaying all posts is now paginated too, which should make the page load faster.



You will find a new CMS Page at "rakeback-news/view-post.html". This page will be used as a template by the CMS when displaying any news post. The {{ news_post }} token will be assigned automatically based on the news URL you're visiting. The title, meta_keywords, and meta_description HTML tags will be populated by the fields you entered in the News Post creation form (unless you left them blank).



Finally, to facilitate generating a SEO friendly link to a news post, we have added the "url" attribute to the {{ news_post }} token. If you have an existing website, you should make sure that the "rakeback-news/rakeback-news.html" and "rakeback-news/quick-rakeback-news.html" pages –which list the most recent news posts– have been updated to use the {{ new_post.url }} token to generate the direct links to the posts. Using the current default 'rakeback-news.html' page content as an example:

PHP Code:

<h1 class="pas">Rakeback News</h1>
{% for news_post in news_posts %}
<h2 class="pas"><a href="{{ news_post.url }}">{{ news_post.subject }}</a></h2>
{{ news_post.date | date: "%m/%d/%Y"}}<br/>
<p>{{ news_post.message }}</p>

{% endfor %} 


We hope that these new features will facilitate the administration of your news posts and increase your Google rankings.

Note: We include the numeric post ID in the first part of the URL to prevent existing outside links from going "dead" if the post subject is changed.

Follow these steps to add a Facebook "Like" button to your PAS powered Rakeback website.

1. Log in to the PAS Publisher Admin, navigate to the CMS and open any of your Rakeback offer pages. For this example we will use the Full Tilt Poker offer page (/rakeback/full-tilt-poker.html)

2. Copy and paste the following HTML to where you want the "Like" button to appear (don't forget to save the CMS Page):

https://gist.github.com/raw/805522/4...gistfile1.html

3. (Optional) If you wish to add Google Analytics tracking to the "Like" URL, edit the "href" part of the iframe and enter your campaign tracking parameters.

Extra credit: If you want the Like button to appear on all of your site pages, just put the code anywhere on your Site layout page (layout/layout.html). The snippet will be smart enough to use the URL of the page the visitor is viewing.

Result:

Follow these simple steps to add a "Tweet" button to your PAS powered Rakeback website:

1. Log in to the PAS Publisher Admin, navigate to the CMS and open any of your Rakeback offer pages. For this example we will use the Full Tilt Poker offer page (/rakeback/full-tilt-poker.html)

2. Copy and paste the following HTML to where you want the "Tweet" button to appear (don't forget to save the CMS Page):

PHP Code:

<a href="http://twitter.com/share" 
data-url="{{ tld }}/{{ current_page }}?analytics=tracking_here"
class="twitter-share-button"
data-text="{{ offer.reward }} Rakeback at {{ offer.name }}" 
data-count="vertical"
data-via="your_twitter_name">Tweet</a>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js"></script> 


Note: You can also find the above snippet here

3. (Optional) If you wish to add Google Analytics tracking to the link, edit the "data-url" attribute and enter your campaign tracking parameters.

4. (Optional) Enter a Twitter username to be suggested in the Tweet in the "data-via" attribute. I would use a Twitter account specifically for your Rakeback website.

Result:


You can find more information about the Tweet button in their documentation

Back in March 2010, we launched Version 3.0 of PAS, which was a complete rewrite of the application in Ruby on Rails, a Ruby web development framework. Since then, the PAS Tech Team has been very active in the Ruby community.

This past week we visited Rubyconf 2010 in New Orleans, Louisiana. The conference was a great success, probably the best one I have ever attended. The main focus this year was profiling and optimizing Ruby applications. We learned a lot from experienced and battle hardened Ruby developers (like a talk from the Twitter Tech Lead of their redesign project).

The biggest surprise was when Yukihiro Matsumoto, the creator of Ruby, announced that he's working with the Japanese government and an undisclosed Japanese company (hinted at Sony) on a "light" version of Ruby: Rite. Their goal is to use Rite on home and mobile devices (TV's, Bluray players, handheld video-games, mp3 players) and draw existing Ruby programmers to their development framework.

We flew back the PAS headquarters with a lot of new ideas and improvements for the network, and we can't wait to share them with you!

Thanks to the feedback provided by one of our Publishers, we decided to add 3 new tokens to the PAS CMS:

{{ user.lifetime_mgr }} - Returns the total lifetime MGR for the signed in Member.
{{ user.current_month_mgr }} - Returns the total MGR for the current month.
{{ user.last_month_mgr }} - Returns the total MGR for last month.

All of these tokens return numbers which can be used with our CMS to add conditional content in your PAS powered website.

For example if you only want to display content to Members who rake more than $100 MGR each month:

Code:

{% if user.current_month_mgr > 100 %}

  You have raked {{ user.current_month_mgr | dollars }} MGR this month.
  You qualify for our premium content!
  .... content goes here ....

{% endif %}

If you want to put this logic in a public page, you can also use the {{ signed_in }} tag within your conditions.

Code:

{% if signed_in %}
  
  {% if user.lifetime_mgr > 0 %}

     Premium content goes here!... 

  {% else %}

     You do not qualify for this content yet, please rake at least $1 in MGR. 
  
  {% endif %}
  
{% else %}

  .. Public content goes here ...

{% endif %}

You can also use logical operators like 'and', 'or' in your conditions:

(If the member has lifetime MGR > 500 and current month MGR > 50)

Code:

{% if user.lifetime_mgr > 500 and user.current_month_mgr > 50 %}

  Premium content goes here!... 

{% else %}

NOTE: Calling the {{ user }} tag when the Member isn't signed in will force a redirect to the login page, so please always use the {{ signed_in }} condition on public pages.

You can read more about the markup language that powers our CMS here (has more examples of what else you can do with it):
https://github.com/tobi/liquid/wiki/...-for-Designers

We're always looking for more input from our users, feel free to post any suggestions you have in the PAS Forum