I spent some time today working on the lostwages codebase. I finally discovered how to get PHP to see the PATH_INFO without getting a 404. Seems you need to put "AllowPathInfo On" in the .htaccess.
In doing so, I can get rid of the ugly ?page=about urls and instead use /site/about.
I updated .htaccess to catch the old urls and put them to the new style.
NOTE to template authors, if you want to put a relative link in the site from now on, use {$root} to have the site put the correct path in for you. For example, <a href="{$root}/site/about">About Wine</a>. This also works for images: <img src="{$root}/images/foo.jpg">