Customizing permalinks and getting the values

Hi all.

I’ve been working with WordPress for about a week or so now, and I’m gettin on pretty well but am now faced with a problem.

I’m using the pretty permalinks on the site but for a certain template I need to be able to pass a variable to determine the content drawn on that page. I also need to be able to create personalised ids in the permalink, and not use the post ids given in the admin.

So, example:

http://myblog.com/rootpage/myid/specificpage/

Where “myid” and “specificpage” are technically the same thing but just number and name respectively. I need to use this “myid” to reference a database in order to grab the correct content but not only do I not know how to grab this value in the PHP, I also don’t know how to create it in the first place in the link.

I hope someone can help me here – and if possible I’d prefer to do this without a plugin/hack.

Thanks
Michael