WordPress Plugin: Visual.SpellCheck
Current Version: 0.95
I don't use the WYSIWYG Editor that comes with WordPress 2.0, and as a result have been getting extremely frustrated with the lack of a spell-checker. So I decided to try and get one working, preferably using AJAX to make it as fast and user-friendly as possible.
I am now proud to present Visual.SpellCheck - an AJAX-based Spell Checker for WordPress. It includes the ability to:
- Highlight incorrectly spelled words
- List suggested words from the aspell dictionary
- List suggested words from your custom dictionary
- Allow new words to be added to your Custom Dictionary
The Spell Checker works in Firefox, Internet Explorer, Opera and Safari.
Demo
Here is a demo of Visual.SpellCheck. It should work fine in Mozilla browsers (including Firefox) and Internet Explorer. It will also function in Opera, although there are some small issues. Follow the instructions in the textarea itself, and feel free to edit it's contents and then test.
Installation
Follow these basic steps:
- Download this file: Visual.SpellCheck.zip (37Kb)
- Unzip the file on your computer.
- Upload the complete folder "Visual.SpellCheck" to your WordPress plugins directory (found in "/wp-content/plugins")
- Login to WordPress and go to the Plugins module
- Find the line that says "Visual.SpellCheck" and click "Activate"
- Change the permissions on the file Visual.Syntax/personal_dictionary/dict.txt" to "757″ so that the server can write to the file
Note: Pspell must be installed on the server for this to work. Also this plugin is not compatible with the WYSIWYG HTML Editor that comes with WordPress (TinyMCE comes with its own spellchecker anyway). You will have to disable the WYSIWYG and be using the old-style editor (textarea).
Credits
This project is based on code from Broken-Notebook. Thanks to Garrison who has modified his original code to allow the plugin to integrate with WordPress and minimise issues with future compatibility.
Known Minor Bugs
This is the only bug I am aware of - and it is pretty minor:
- In Opera the popup menu that shows the suggested words always sits top-left of the textarea
If you are able to help with this that would be great. 
ChangeLog
2006-02-04 - Firefox QuickTags conflict fixed. Now version 0.95 2006-02-04 - Public release of version 0.90
If you liked this plugin you can digg it here or please leave a comment.
February 5th, 2006 at 6:22 am
[…] Here’s a new Ajax-based spell checker for WordPress that uses Pspell on the back end. Doesn’t work in the RTE, just in the textarea. […]
February 5th, 2006 at 5:07 pm
Too amazing dude. I love. Infact I’ve recommended WP.com to have this as well. Could you tell as to how exactly you made this. It’s the best spell-check plugin I’ve seen so far. Already blogged about this and have posted this in WP Forums as well. You should post this in the Plugin Database and the Codex.
http://wordpress.com/forums/topic.php?id=488&replies=1
February 5th, 2006 at 5:15 pm
[…] Called Visual Spell Check, this is made fully using AJAX. It’s clean, light, uber-fast and very user-friendly. It automatically checks the text for mistakes and highlights it and once you click there, correct words are suggest. Here is the URL.. Moreover, you can […]
February 6th, 2006 at 4:38 pm
Discovered this through Asymptomatic. Works great on my site.
Thanks for a great plugin.
February 6th, 2006 at 4:51 pm
Thanks for the feedback guys. Look for an update in the next week or so to try and make this bug-free for all users…
February 7th, 2006 at 12:12 am
Excellent and I’ve posted about this in the WP forums.. The response is that if this could work for the WYSWYG editor, then definitely this can be added to WP.com. Would be a great credit to you if you could work on that. .
Cheers and all the best!
February 8th, 2006 at 11:11 am
Excellent!
February 12th, 2006 at 12:09 pm
I was looking for a non-wysiwyg spell checker for wordpress 2 and this one looks really nice.
But i get a few notices when i try to spell check, i think it is because i use error_reporting E_ALL on my server’s php.ini setup.
I think you should fix these notices, there are only 4 or 5 i think and it would make the plugin even better for us E_ALL coders
Other than that, thanks for the nice spell checker.
Greets.
ved
February 21st, 2006 at 7:50 pm
Is there a way to get it to work on Write Pages too. Right now it only works on Write Posts. Great Plugin though.
Sean
February 25th, 2006 at 3:19 am
[…] Visual.SpellCheck is an AJAX-powered plugin to check your spelling in WordPress. […]
February 26th, 2006 at 3:08 am
Matt,
Thanks for making this available. Ajax is awesome.
Ulysses
March 5th, 2006 at 7:11 pm
Hello
It seems this plug-in strips ‘class’ and ‘alt’ attributes from ‘img’ tags that are in the post. Is this a bug or have I done something wrong?
Other than that it seems to be a great plug-in, thanks for making it.
March 9th, 2006 at 9:07 am
FYI… your demo includes an incorrectly spelled word that is not being detected. actionn with a double n is escaping the spell checker for me…
Also, your comments seem to suggest that the WYSIWYG editor in 2.0 has it’s own spell checking? I’m a new WP user and I’m a bit confounded by that as I can’t seem to find one built in or listed on the Plugins list on the Codex. Could a friendly person out there set me straight on this??? Thanks!
April 21st, 2006 at 9:28 am
I have been looking for something like this for a while… and it seems that all the spell checkers out there are sub par. However there are a few Spell Checker plugins out there that are pretty decent, given whats out there. This seems to be one of the better ones. They will only get better.
It is the most asked for feature right now,.. it is odd that there isnt more chatter.
April 27th, 2006 at 5:38 am
[…] To get the info just go to Matt’s excellent blog. […]
June 22nd, 2006 at 11:54 am
[…] Presenting a professional, cohesive and consistent blog is essential to increasing traffic. However, if the majority of your blog posts are completely interwoven with erroneous spelling mistakes, and horrific grammatical errors you are immediately presenting an air of unprofessionalism. Therefore the introduction of the Visual Spellchecker by Matthew Delmater is an excellent AJAX solution which can ensure that your posts are spelling-error free. […]
July 19th, 2006 at 4:51 am
[…] Visual.SpellCheck an AJAX based spellchecker for the non-WYSIWYG Editor does the job for me - if I’m writing on my site, right now Aspell and Gnome-Blog do the work on my Desktop. […]
July 25th, 2006 at 1:58 pm
[…] From the previous version of my last post, people with even moderate knowledge of English could have easily understood that I suck at spelling ad that, consequently, I did not have a spelling checker installed at this blog. Both of those two conclusions would be true. So I decided to break in and install something to help me and after some mishaps, I settled on Visual Spellcheck plug-in. I am editing my posts in HTML anyway, so lack of WYSIWYG editor support is not critical for me, more like the opposite. All I needed was to install the plug-in, activate it in wordpress, install php5-pspell package and restart Apache. I forgot to restart Apache at first and got a cryptic error from the included fake pspell wrapper. Also aspell and corresponding language libraries must be installed on server site. […]
September 30th, 2006 at 10:05 am
[…] There are several WordPress spell check plugin i found on the net, but only one that i really like, introducing Visual.SpellCheck by Matthew Delmarter, an AJAX spell checker that function almost like the one in Gmail, but Pspell must be installed on your server in order to use this plugin. […]