Permalinks, Custom Page Templates and QueryStrings

I have done a lot of searching and have some pretty close, but couldn’t find the solution I was looking for.

I would like to use ‘pretty’ permalinks for a plugin I’m creating which uses custom Page templates to control the logic.

For example, I have a custom page “Members” which uses the template page-members.php and accepts a querystring variable for the member’s display_name, then displays custom data for that member extracted from the UserMeta plugin.

This all works great using the following URL structure:

/member/?member_id=membername

I have struggled to get it to work using:

/member/membername

Where I have attempted to get it to rewrite the URL as the querystring.

I used the Custom Rewrite Rules Plugin without any luck and tried various methods to get a custom rewrite into effect.

Is there a reliable way to tell WordPress that you wish to parse values after the trailing slash as querystring values?

I know there is something relevant to allowed querystrings and placing custom redirects before the default wordpress ones, but still I haven’t been able to piece it all together.

Any advice would be much appreciated.

Cheers,

Bodog.