I am dealing with a frustrating problem with Joomla that is going to require some url trickery. The idea is straight-forward but after reading a bunch of guides for mod-rewrite, I still can't seem to get it work.

Let's say my site is www.mysite.com. Joomla is already performing some rewriting for SEF urls so I have links like www.mysite.com/home and www.mysite.com/news and so on. I want to be able to have (4) pseudo-subdirectories like www.mysite.com/mode1/ and www.mysite.com/mode2/ and so on. These subdirectories should work as if the subdirectory isn't there, ie both www.mysite.com/mode1/home and www.mysite.com/mode2/home should pull up the same www.mysite.com/home. It should point any www.mysite.com/mode1/anypagehere to www.mysite.com/anypagehere.

The reason I am asking for this is because I will be reading the url for mode1, mode2, etc, to modify the template page. There will be a landing page that will direct people to /mode1/ and /mode2/ etc and the template will change based on that. Note, that I don't want to actually pass a parameter to the url accessible by a GET or whatever because Joomla removes it (perhaps because of my current mod_rewrite settings). I've pasted the current .htaccess file.

RewriteBase /joomla
##########Rewrite rules to block out some common exploits                                  
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} mosConfig_[a-zA-Z_]{1,21}(=|\%3D) [OR]
# Block out any script trying to base64_encode crap to send via URL
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} base64_encode.*\(.*\) [OR]
# Block out any script that includes a <script> tag in URL
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} (\<|%3C).*script.*(\>|%3E) [NC,OR]
# Block out any script trying to set a PHP GLOBALS variable via URL
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} GLOBALS(=|\[|\%[0-9A-Z]{0,2}) [OR]
# Block out any script trying to modify a _REQUEST variable via URL
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} _REQUEST(=|\[|\%[0-9A-Z]{0,2})
# Send all blocked request to homepage with 403 Forbidden error!
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ index.php [F,L]

########## Begin - Joomla! core SEF Section
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/index.php
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} (/|\.php|\.html|\.htm|\.feed|\.pdf|\.raw|/[^.]*)$  [NC]
RewriteRule (.*) index.php
#RewriteRule .* - [E=HTTP_AUTHORIZATION:%{HTTP:Authorization},L]
########## End - Joomla! core SEF Section