i have a url like this.
http://www.somesite.com/community.php?id=4
for id number 4 would equal Washington for id number 5 would equal Den
Have a look at mod_rewrite: http://httpd.apache.org/docs/current/mod/mod_rewrite.html
You can, for example, do it like this:
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule washington community.php?id=4 [L,QSA]
RewriteRule denver community.php?id=5 [L,QSA]
This would, of course, lead to a LOT of rewrite rules if you have much cities. So, a IMHO smarter way would be to rewrite the URI slug to community.php and lookup the ID from some sort of database:
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCOnd %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule /?([a-z-]+) community.php?city=$1 [L,QSA]
HTH