Feature: Reading Time Helper

Opening for discussion.

This one has been requested many many times in one form or another. I want to get a sense of whether it’s worth pursuing.

Essentially this would be a simple {{reading-time}} helper available both in admin and in themes which would output the estimated average reading time based on the length of your post.

I think this feature is generally useful, and wouldn’t add much overhead anywhere.

[JohnONolan]

it’s as simple as adding something like this to their code-injection box

It’s actually not - that implementation only works when applied to content on the current page. The most common implementation and use-case for reading time is to display the estimated reading time before someone decides to click through and open the post (eg. index.hbs) where only an {{excerpt}} is available.

I doubt something like that works well with non-roman languages

That’s a valid consideration, but it is absolutely secondary to English - which is our primary audience - and not a reason to omit this (or any) feature. Put another way: Translation is a progressive enhancement rather than a baseline requirement.

One alternative that might be worth considering is that the only thing reading-time estimates are based on is wordcount. So if there was a helper to make post word-count available to themes, it might have multiple use-cases including this one?

[novaugust]

This doesn’t seem like something that needs to make it into ghost core to me. If people want to add reading time to their blog, it’s as simple as adding something like this to their code-injection box, et voila. Not to mention, I doubt something like that works well with non-roman languages