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