About the (eventual) skin

[whoiam]

mod_rewrite's an apache module for doing slightly more complicated redirects - for instance, redirecting every url containing '.tpl' to a different folder.

.htaccess is a 'supplementary' configuration file for apache that sits in the directory it's meant to affect.

I'm going to modify one of the test forums I keep to try and get the dynamic image generator working, if you want to give that mod a try, let me know.