Mohammad Sajid Ansari

<p><strong>Idara Reading Time</strong> 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.</p>
<p><em>Idara (إدارة) is an Arabic word meaning “studio” or “administration” — the brand behind a growing family of carefully crafted, single-purpose Gutenberg blocks.</em></p>
<h4>Why this and not a full block suite?</h4>
<p>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 <strong>only on pages where the block is present</strong> — never globally.</p>
<h4>Features</h4>
<ul>
<li>Estimated reading time, calculated server-side from your post content</li>
<li>Display as a single value (“3 min read”) or a friendly range (“2–3 min read”)</li>
<li>Adjustable words-per-minute (50–600)</li>
<li>4 icon styles: clock, timer, hourglass, or none</li>
<li>Optional scroll progress bar with color, height, and position (top/bottom)</li>
<li>Hide on short posts (e.g. don’t show on anything under 2 minutes)</li>
<li>Custom prefix and suffix text</li>
<li>Inherits theme typography and text color via block supports</li>
<li>Full Site Editing (FSE) compatible — works inside block templates and template parts</li>
<li>Block toolbar shortcuts for icon cycling and range toggle</li>
<li>Semantic, accessible markup with ARIA labels</li>
<li>No tracking, no external requests, no third-party services</li>
<li>Translation-ready</li>
</ul>
<h4>Use cases</h4>
<ul>
<li>Blog posts where readers want to gauge time investment</li>
<li>Long-form articles where the scroll progress bar improves engagement</li>
<li>Documentation sites</li>
<li>News and magazine layouts</li>
</ul>
<h3>Development</h3>
<p>Source code and build tools are available on GitHub:<br />
https://github.com/sajid-ansari-65/idara-reading-time</p>
<p>The <code>src/</code> directory contains the unminified JavaScript (ES modules, JSX) and SCSS. Run <code>npm install && npm run build</code> to compile.</p>


Idara Reading Time

Show estimated reading time with an optional scroll progress bar. A lightweight, FSE-ready Gutenberg block that loads only where used.

iansvo

<p>This block allows you to add an additional block content area to a site-editor template and store the block output inside a meta field. By default, WordPress posts or pages may only store blocks in one place: post_content. These blocks are output on the page using the core/post-content block. This block allows you to have multiple “outlets” where you can add blocks so you can have post-specific blocks appear in more than one location in the template.</p>
<p>The block is a fork of the core/post-content block that uses a customized version of the useEntityBlockEditor hook which supports meta keys. The blocks for your content area are then stored inside that meta key (instead of post_content). This allows you to keep the blocks separate and you can use as many of these on a single template as you want (but in most cases 2 is probably enough). It’s all up to you!</p>
<h3>Requirements</h3>
<ol>
<li>Using this plugin requires you to enable template previews (which will let you visually see the new content area you’re adding). This can be enabled on any given post or page, but you can optionally set it on by default using a filter.</li>
<li>Your theme must be a block theme (i.e. it uses the site editor). This won’t work for a hybrid or classic theme (which has no concept of live template preview in the block editor).</li>
</ol>
<h3>Hooks</h3>
<p>If you want to disable this meta key’s registration, add the following to your theme or plugin:</p>
<pre><code><?php
add_filter( 'content_area_block_register_default_meta', '__return_false' );
</code></pre>
<p>For advanced users, there is also a filter for the entire block’s output. See the below snippet from render.php:</p>
<pre><code><?php
/**
 * Filter the block's frontend output.
 *
 * @param string $parsed_content The parsed block content for output.
 * @param int    $block_post_id  The current post ID the block is displaying in.
 * @param array  $attributes     The block attributes.
 * @param string $content        The original unparsed block content.
 * @param object $block          The current parsed block object.
 *
 * @return The block content for output on the frontend.
 */
$output = apply_filters( 
    'content_area_block_content', 
    do_blocks( str_replace( ']]>', ']]&gt;', $content ) ), 
    $block_post_id, 
    $attributes, 
    $content, 
    $block 
);
</code></pre>
<h3>Contributing</h3>
<p>The plugin source code may be found here: https://github.com/iansvo/content-area-block.</p>
<p>To build the plugin from source, you must have NodeJS (v24+) installed.</p>
<p>Setup Steps:</p>
<ol>
<li>Navigate to the project folder in your terminal.</li>
<li>Run <code>npm i</code> to install dependencies.</li>
<li>Run <code>npm run build</code> to performn the initial build.</li>
</ol>
<p>If you’re using wp-env to run the plugin…<br />
1. Run <code>npm run wp-env start</code> to start the docker container.<br />
2. Run <code>npm run start</code> to watch for file changes.</p>


Content Area Block

Adds a block content area to a site editor template and stores the blocks in a specified meta field. By default, the plugin will add a new meta field  …

Idara Reading Time vs Content Area Block