I was wondering how can I create clean urls using PHP. Do I do this all in PHP or do I need to use mod_rewrite in some way? Can someone explain this to me in laymans terms?<
You have to use a rewrite to direct all requests to an existing php file, otherwise you get all 404 not found errors because you are trying to get a page that simply is not there.
Unless you rewrite your 404 page to handle all requests and you definitely don´t want to go there...