The path tricks you want are handled by Apache's mod_rewrite.

And handled well they are. I've really fallen in love with mod_rewrite, it is just so useful. I set up a demo server for our customers, where depending on the login name used, a completely different server will be presented to them. On the server-side, it's just subdirectories (makes it easy for us to manage them), but the clients are never aware that there's anything else on the server apart from what they're seeing. I also use it to redirect multi-language pages and setting environment variables according to the language selected.