Search-Engine Friendly URL's

[Rezek]

I'm trying to develop a PHP / MySQL website. Everything uses index.php, which takes three parameters, C (category), S (section), and P (page). So If a user wanted to visit a php tutorial on reading from files, they'd go to:

www.domain.com/index.php?c=tutorials&s=php&p=reading-from-files

which would then look up the appropriate content in a database and display it for the user. However, that kind of url looks kind of ugly and isn't very search engine friendly. What I would like is a url like this:

www.domain.com/tutorials/php/reading-from-files

I know I can do this using mod_rewrite and believe me I have tried every tutorial I could find, but no matter what I tried, nothing, nothing worked . I am extremely frustrated and was wondering if any of you could help? Also, wordpress seems to be able to do this without mod_rewrite. How?

One last thing, I still need to be able to access regular files normally, for example

www.domain.com/templates/softblue/images/banner.png

would still work normally. Sorry If I'm not explaining my problem very well, I'm trying to get it across... in case you can't tell, I'm pretty angry right now, at myself mostly. :|

[EDIT]

Oh, and it should be collapsable too, IE

www.domain.com/tutorials/php

would go to:

www.domain.com/index.php?c=tutorials/s=php

and so on.

[kermmartian]

Use Apache rewrites for your urls. Edit: erm, read that post a little better.
Make sure that you turn the rewrite engine on, that you have the htaccess in your web root, and that your host allows htaccess.

[Rezek]

Yeah, I've done all of those things. My mod rewrite's work now, but relative addresses don't :(

Ok, got it all figured out The thing is for relative addresses, you have to put a "/" in front of them. Of course that defaults to the root directory, but it still works for me :)

Thanks anyways.