Idara Reading Time is a focused, single-purpose Gutenberg block that does one thing well: shows readers how long your post will take. It also offers an optional scroll progress bar — a thin bar pinned to the top or bottom of the page that fills as the visitor scrolls.

Idara (إدارة) is an Arabic word meaning “studio” or “administration” — the brand behind a growing family of carefully crafted, single-purpose Gutenberg blocks.

Why this and not a full block suite?

Most block plugins ship 30+ blocks you’ll never use, slowing your editor and your frontend. Idara plugins are deliberately small. This one is under 25 KB. CSS and JS load only on pages where the block is present — never globally.

Features

Estimated reading time, calculated server-side from your post content
Display as a single value (“3 min read”) or a friendly range (“2–3 min read”)
Adjustable words-per-minute (50–600)
4 icon styles: clock, timer, hourglass, or none
Optional scroll progress bar with color, height, and position (top/bottom)
Hide on short posts (e.g. don’t show on anything under 2 minutes)
Custom prefix and suffix text
Inherits theme typography and text color via block supports
Full Site Editing (FSE) compatible — works inside block templates and template parts
Block toolbar shortcuts for icon cycling and range toggle
Semantic, accessible markup with ARIA labels
No tracking, no external requests, no third-party services
Translation-ready

Use cases

Blog posts where readers want to gauge time investment
Long-form articles where the scroll progress bar improves engagement
Documentation sites
News and magazine layouts

Development

Source code and build tools are available on GitHub:
https://github.com/sajid-ansari-65/idara-reading-time

The src/ directory contains the unminified JavaScript (ES modules, JSX) and SCSS. Run npm install && npm run build to compile.