How To Customize Estimated Reading Time Plugin for WordPress

(Reading time: 1 – 2 minutes)

Ben grabbed a coupon to force me to expose my secrets for the “estimated reading time” that leads off each post. I wasn’t going to tell anyone how I did this because it’s so easy, really, it’s a snap. I’m going to show you how to do this in 3 easy steps.

1. Install Estimated Reading Time plugin. Use “Plugins >> Add New” from the administrative panel.
2. Modify plugin. Go to the plugin editor and open up estreadtime.php. It looks like this:

   36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43

   else $output = sprintf(__("Reading time: %s - %s minutes"), $minutes_fast, $minutes_slow);   if ($return) return $output; else echo $output; }

   You want to change lines 40 and 42 so that they look like this:

   39 40 41 42 43

   if ($return) return '<p class="estread">' . $output . '</p>'; else echo '<p class="estread">' . $output . '</p>'; }

3. Modify CSS. Here’s how mine looks:

   p.estread {
      padding-bottom: 1em;
      font-size: 65%;
      font-weight: bold;
   }

That’s all there is too it!

Or is it…

I’ve done something else pretty sneaky to get exactly the layout I want. Can you guess what it is?

Tagged as: Reading