Issue Summary
It’s probably not an issue on a real blog but I discovered it while working on a theme. If a post is empty, the reading_time doesn’t output anything.
Steps to Reproduce
Create a post with a title but no content.
Open post
Setup information
Ghost Version
5.128.0
Node.js Version
v20.19.3
How did you install Ghost?
python venv, nodeenv, ghost install local
Provide details of your host & operating system
Local development, Ubuntu Linux in WSL
The issue occurs because {{reading_time}} relies on post content to calculate reading duration, so with no content, it returns nothing. To fix this in your theme, wrap {{reading_time}} with a conditional check like {{#if content}} {{reading_time}} {{else}} 0 min read {{/if}} to ensure a fallback message appears when a post is empty.