Adding custom rewrite rules to WordPress

My WordPress site has a portfolio that is at www.mysite.com/portfolio/. The portfolio sections & items are administered through a custom plugin I created. I want to access the individual items like www.mysite.com/portfolio/my-cool-photo & have that put “my-cool-photo” into a query string like ?portfolio_item=my-cool-photo so I can read it from my code.

In the plugins activation PHP file I have this code:

function add_rewrite_rules($wp_rewrite) {    $new_rules = array(        'portfolio/(.+)/?$' => 'index.php?&portfolio_item=$1'    );    $wp_rewrite->rules = $new_rules + $wp_rewrite->rules;}add_action('generate_rewrite_rules', 'add_rewrite_rules');function query_vars($public_query_vars) {    $public_query_vars[] = "portfolio_item";    return $public_query_vars;}add_filter('query_vars', 'query_vars');

This adds the rewrite rule to the array OK. The problem is it’s not doing anything. When I go to www.mysite.com/portfolio/testing/ I obtain the “This is somewhat embarrassing, isn’t it?” WordPress 404 error page. Obviously the redirect isn’t working, so the query string won’t be filled, yet just to make sure I did this:

global $wp_query, $wp_rewrite;if ($wp_rewrite->using_permalinks()) {    $searchKey = $wp_query->query_vars['portfolio_item'];} else {    $searchKey = $_GET['portfolio_item'];}

…and sure enough the query string isn’t getting passed.

Is there something I’m missing?

After you update the WordPress rewrite rules, you need to flush them:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference/flush_rewrite_rules

You can select to flush with the $hard parameter true, & then you should be able to see your rewrite rules in the .htaccess file.