OK, I've had some time to work on this a bit more. First, I started with the generic example that Draven proposed. It works fine. However, since I'm interested in "friendly" URLs as much (more than) "spiderable" URLs, I took this to the next step and eliminated extra "subdirectories" being passed in the URL. My next post includes discussion of editing templates.
(Note: these examples do not touch the core. At most, you edit templates. If one were going to play with the core, it might be worthwhile to look into pulling up a story by a munged version of the <storytitle> which is a more friendly, memorable URL and (I think) improves the spider's index rank. Or, if concerned with duplicates, perhaps <dateyyyymmdd>/<storytitle> )
First, the generic example:
[size=x-small]
RewriteRule ^news/([^/]+)/([^/]+)/([^/]+)$ /modules/news/$1.php?$2=$3 [L]
RewriteRule ^news(.*)$ /modules/news$1 [L]
[/size]
This first example works fine, creating spiderable URLs.
/news/article/storyid/44
maps to
/modules/news/article.php?storyid=44
However, I figured since I'm going to be editing the templates anyways, why not shorten it further. In the next example, you will see that:
Line 1 handles a trailing slash or anything else that shouldn't be there.
Line 2 is the URL for News we are shooting for
Line 3 is the catchall so existing functions continue to work properly.
/news/44
maps to
/modules/news/article.php?storyid=44
[size=x-small]
RewriteRule ^news/([^/]+)/(.*)$ /modules/news/article.php?storyid=$1 [L]
RewriteRule ^news/([^/]+)$ /modules/news/article.php?storyid=$1 [L]
RewriteRule ^news(.*)$ /modules/news$1 [L]
[/size]
The next message will be a couple example edited templates.
Next, I will tackle WFSections and see if I can keep the URL as generic and flexible as possible.