This should be obvious, but I’m not familiar with nginx, so it wasn’t.
I added trunk.elftest.net as a separate subdomain (rather than Multisite) because I wanted it to run trunk and not impact anyone else.
The way that DreamHost works, is you have a separate folder for your nginx configurations, called nginx, and it lives off your home directory. This is commonly referenced as ~/nginx/ and yes, if you type in cd ~/nginx/ you’ll jump right there.
To make WordPress work, I had to create ~/nginx/trunk.elftest.net and add a wordpress.conf file there, with the standard DreamHost nginx config for WP.
######################
# Permalinks
if (!-e $request_filename) {
rewrite ^.*$ /index.php last;
}
Magic.
