It doesn't go by # of characters or words. When you write your post, at the point where you want the "read more" to show up click the "!M" button on the quicktags toolbar. That will make the "read more" show up.

So what do I do if I am upgrading from an earlier version and I have 100s of blogs that don't have the read more tag in them? I also have multiple people writing on the blog, so hard to make sure that they are diligent in putting the tag in.

Earlier versions of b2evolution, all the way back to 0.8.6.2, had the !M function if I recall correctly, so if no one used it then that's just the way it was and is yah? But that doesn't mean it can't be cleaned up going forward.

As far as educating your bloggers goes, that's just a matter of letting them know what expectations you have to be a blogger on your system. If one of your expectations is that bloggers should take advantage of the !M function after a paragraph or two, then let them know that and let them know why. Most folk will cooperate I'd guess. And for those who don't, you decide if it is important enough to you to revoke their permissions.

Hey for the old stuff you can install the ministats plugin and, after getting your bloggers on board with the !M feature, ask them to edit any of their posts that show up in one of the ministats sections and to put a !M at an appropriate place.

I suppose a really smart person could make a plugin that would automagically put in a !M-like behavior after a certain number of words or characters or even after the first full paragraph is done, but to the best of my knowledge it hasn't been done. Yet!

Yes exactly. In the earlier version we used the following code in the template _main.php like so:

find:

<h2 class="bTitle"><?php $Item->title(); ?></h2>

<div class="bText">
	<?php 
	$Item->content();

replace with:

<h2 class="bTitle"><a href="<?php $Item->permanent_url() ?>"><?php $Item->title(); ?></a></h2>

<div class="bText">
	<?php
	if( $disp == 'single' )
	{
		$Item->content();
	}
	else
	{
		$Item->content( '#', true , 'Read More', 'Read more here', '', '', 'htmlbody', 150);
		?><a href="<?php $Item->permanent_url() ?>">[Read More]</a><?php

	}

I just can't figure out where to put this in,or how to change it for the new version.

Ah okay I see. Dunno how to do that currently though. Plus I gotta run and get some crap done so I don't have time to play right now. I'll see if I can figure something out later though.

Okay, thanks :)