The "Read more" tag and conditionally showing a 'read more' link

I’m not sure I’m 100% clear on the question, but if you’re asking how to add or customize the words used for read more, the placeholder can be used like this…

#_EVENTEXCERPT{words,...}

…where words is the number of words that should be used in the excerpt and … is the wording to be used.

https://wp-events-plugin.com/documentation/placeholders/

Thanks for the suggestion. My goal is to output a “read more” link only when an excerpt is displayed, whether that be because a <!-- more --> tag was inserted, or because a separate excerpt was created.

#_EVENTEXCERPT{words,...}

Using the placeholder with that syntax seems to affect all posts except those which have a separate excerpt associated with them. The use of a number to control the size of the excerpt means that any existing <!-- more --> tag is ignored.

The bigger problem I see is that I don’t seem to be able to add a link to the full post in the ... parameter:

#_EVENTEXCERPT{10, ...<a href="#_EVENTURL">Continue reading</a>}

…presumably because you can’t nest placeholders.

Doing some more digging, it looks like in general WordPress doesn’t really offer a unified way of handling “read more” links, giving theme authors the option of truncating a full post with the <!--more--> tag if displaying via the_content or truncating posts automatically based on content length (or explicit excerpt) using the_excerpt.

So I guess I should ask: Is use of the <!--more--> tag in event content supported? I can’t tell whether it is not or whether I’ve monkeyed with my template too much!

Yes, you should be able to use <!--more--> within the event description.