there is no other function for the levels than the onces on that manual page.

You can use the levels to decide if users can upload images.. but that's as far as it goes in 0.9.0.x

Okay, let's say I want to run a blog that holds information about some specific topic... I want to have, say, 75% of the posts be available to whoever wants to read them. I want to have 25% of the information be more of a "sign up to see these posts" kind of thing...

If I set the "new user" level to '0' for anyone who wants to sign up to see those posts, are level '0' users able to make posts? Can they log in to the admin area? I'd prefer to have a class of users for this purpose which are unable to see the admin area and who can't post on their own, except to make comments, etc...

I understand that a "blog" is meant to be more of an open forum for reading, but I'm wondering if there's a way to do this...

jj.

What you would do in this case is simply make the user a member of the blog that contains the posts, but not give them any posting rights. Ignore the user level for now, they're just a bit of legacy from the orginal b2 really.