Terminology

There are going to be some basic WordPress-related terms that you'll want to become familiar with. These terms usually apply to multisite and a standard WordPress single-site install. You can check some of the terminologies used in WordPress at http://codex.wordpress.org/WordPress_Semantics.

Now that you've got some basic WordPress knowledge, we might as well get to downloading and installing WordPress. The WordPress installation process is very easy, only requiring you to upload the files to your webhost and then to edit database connection settings in a file named wp-config.php.

Before we get too far, we need to take a couple things into consideration. First, think about how you want URLs to be set up. You can use subdomains for each individual's blog URL or you can use a subfolder style setup, such as http://multisite.longren.org/tyler/. Also, installing themes and plugins is a bit different from a typical WordPress install, but we'll get to that a bit later in this chapter. I really suggest reading the Before You Create A Network article in the WordPress Codex, available at http://codex.wordpress.org/Before_You_Create_A_Network.

Okay, let's get down to installing WordPress and enabling the multisite feature.