[Theme: Brand New Day] Shortening post excerpt and adding "Read More"

It’s possible with almost any theme. ?? You can use the <!--more--> tag in your posts (paste it into HTML view) to cut off your posts at the desired length and add a read more link.

Hi, thank you for the response. I am trying to do it automatically without having to add the <!–more–> tag to each post. Is this possible? I will have people updating the site that may forget.

I would also like for maybe 5 or 6 posts to show per page and then the older posts populate on a second page.

It’s possible; I’d first create a child theme, then add the theme’s index.php to the child theme and replace the_content() with the_excerpt().

For the posts per page, you can set this in General -> Reading. If you want to display a specific number of posts on the home page and a different number on the archives page, that should be handled by a plugin, not the theme.