The newest updates to WordPress allow developers to carry out rewriting of pretty URL permalinks using the WP Rewrite class in a fashion similar to Apache’s htaccess mod rewrite but handled internally within the PHP instead of by Apache.
A useful tool for creating these rewrites and testing them is the plugin Rewrite, which is a WordPress plugin to help you doing many things with URL rewrites such as edit, backup, restore and create custom rewrite without having to touch PHP code. With this plugin you can also test URL that match to rules.