Anyway, I'm on a Mac right now, so I've been using MAMP as my local server. One of the features I intend for the site is WordPress MultiSite, as I'd like for users of the site to be able to create their own mini-site when they sign up. I've got my WP set up locally, and went ahead and tried following a few different online tutorials on how to alter it in order to access the network setup, the main one being WordPress's Own. However, after completing Step 2: Allow Multisite, which requires a quick change to the wp-config.php file in my set-up, I ran into a problem. Going to the Administration -> Tools -> Network Setup page that newly appeared, I received an error:
Error: You cannot install a network of sites with your server address. You cannot use port numbers such as :8888
A bit of google searching turned up quite a few people that had run into the same problem, however most of these stated that a simple fix to the 'hosts' and 'httpd.conf' files would be good enough. However, you'll also need to set up virtual hosts in your apache set-up, a step many seemed to skip. The best tutorial I found to cover almost everything I ended up doing was Danilo Stern-Sapad's.
However, and I can't stress this enough, you may still run into problems trying to get to your site using the new url. After following the instructions, whenever I tried to access my newly named dev environment, I'd still get an error page. For an example, we'll say I changed it to "newwebsite.dev". Whenever I entered in newwebsite.dev into the browser, it would automatically switch to newwebsite.dev:8888 and throw an error. After much searching, I finally found a fix in the comments section here. What I had to do was start up MySQLWorkbench, pull up my WordPress database, and change a couple items in the wp_options Table. Basically just scan through and change anything that has the original port number :8888 or whatever yours may have been, to point to the your newly named url. After that, you're also probably going to want to clear out your cookies cache on your browser, I had to before it finally worked properly.
So, just wanted to share the problems I went through trying to get this thing started, and the solutions I found, because it didn't seem like anyone ever ran it through from start to finish. Hope this helps any one that finds it.