I have been playing around with Apaches mod_rewrite on my other site http://www.2big2send.com and i must admit its a whole lot easier than i first thought..

Here is a quick guide for most general use:

Create a new file in your main directory (public_html for cPanel or httpdocs for plesk – not sure about other ones) called .htaccess (Dont forget the ‘.’ dot before the name – you may already have one of these file, thats ok, just edit it and follow the guide below.

RewriteEngine On
# Check if the file or directory actually exists – if it does we dont want to redirect
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
# Pass the rewritten URL onto index.php with a $_GET['url'] parameter
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ index.php?url=$1 [PT,L]

What the above Apache code does is firstly check the actual URL and ensure that is it not a file or directory, that actually exists.
Then it passes the request onto index.php for handling

Here is the index.php code with the handler

   function handleRequest($urlString) {
        $url = array();
        // Split apart the URL String on the forward slashes.
        $url = explode(‘/’, $urlString);

        switch($url[0]) {
            case ‘home’:
                include_once(‘home.php’);
                break;
            case ‘news’:
                include_once(‘news.php’);
                break;
            default:
                include_once(‘home.php’);
                break;
        }
    }

    $incommingURL = (isset($_GET[‘url’]) ? $_GET[‘url’] : ”);
    handleRequest($incommingURL);

So… The handleRequest function takes in the URL GET parameter we setup in the .htaccess file.
We split that apart on the forward slashes so it can be easily expanded.
I have assumes that the first part of the URL will be the base page; so for example: http://www.domain.com/home will cause the home.php page to be included.
If the URL was  http://www.domain.com/news/page-1 then the news.php page would be included, and then you would do some processing on the news.php page to handle the /page-1 part of the URL ($url[1]).

Here is the part you are most interested in – the

Mod_Rewrite and PHP Demo

and

Mod_Rewrite.zip Download

There are a few Gotchas that I found; the main one being that you must edit your httpd.conf file, you will find a <Directory /> part where AllowOverride None is listed – you MUST change this part to AllowOverride All or mod_rewrite will not work.
There are others – but i will have to answer them as you come across them as i cant remember off the top of my head.