Solr Cores and Custom Indexes

My adventures with Solr continue!  I was working recently on a feature that required sorting results by the value of a field of a linked item.

Solr Core Discovery

I did a walk-through post awhile back on setting up Solr as a Sitecore 7 index provider.  One of the steps involved defining a "core" (also refered to as a "collection") to hold the indexes.  The way I described is no longer required, as of Solr 4.4, and will no longer work with Solr 5.  (Solr is currently on release 4.6.1).