You can make your virtual hosts as fancy as you can any apache site, with re-write url rules, htaccess, and any directive you can put in a httpd.conf, pretty much. Start simple and work up is my advice.

Here is the VirtualHost I'm using to write this site:
<VirtualHost kfd>
  ServerAdmin webmaster@dummy-host.example.com
  DocumentRoot /usr/local/apache/htdocs/kfdev/site
  ServerName kfd
</VirtualHost>


Pretty simple huh? I have an entry in my /etc/hosts file mapping kfd to an internal ip, so I just type kfd in a browser window, and I have just what I'll get when I upload the site to the ISP.

Of course, you have to have your box listening on multiple ip addresses, so you might want to read about that here.