ColdForged (971 comments) - December 8th, 2004

Good question, I’ll have to investigate.

EDIT: After taking a look at the underlying code, this seems like a design decision of the Speller Pages project. I’ll mull it over some to see if there’s a way around it. Thanks for bringing it to my attention.

ColdForged (971 comments) - December 8th, 2004

I get a script error saying ”’spellChecker’ is undefined.”

Sounds like it couldn’t find the js file… is your WordPress installation in a subdirectory? If so, modify the spell-plugin.php file to have the correct path to the javascript file. Search for “wp-content” and make sure that it goes to the right place.

<script language="javascript" type="text/javascript" src="/wp-content/plugins/spell/spellChecker.js">

I may have to adjust how that path is derived in a follow-on release.

Ron (23 comments) - December 8th, 2004

I corrected the path to my plug-ins directory, and now the pop up window displays the front page of my web log.

ColdForged (971 comments) - December 8th, 2004

You run into the same problem that I did when I was writing a spell-check plugin. You must have aspell on your server, and that is not as ubiquitous as it should be, case in point my MacOS Z Panther server doesn’t have it, so this won’t work.

Yeah, I had named that as a prerequisite but it bears repeating. Is there an alternative executable that’s common on Panther?

ColdForged (971 comments) - December 8th, 2004

Anybody know of a way to make the dictionary ignore the XHTML tags themselves?

Another good question. Something else I’d like to work into a follow-on release. I’m trying to think up a methodology that would succeed for this, but nothing’s come to mind yet. Thanks for the input.

Ron (23 comments) - December 9th, 2004

The spellChecker.js points in the right directory. The top half of the screen will begin with “Spell check in progress…” and then go to the front page of my web log. The bottom half seems like it is displaying properly.

Mark J (4 comments) - December 9th, 2004

Instead of requiring people to manually set the URI to WordPress, why not just do it for them using

<?php bloginfo('home'); ?>

?

ColdForged (971 comments) - December 9th, 2004

The spellChecker.js points in the right directory. The top half of the screen will begin with “Spell check in progress…” and then go to the front page of my web log. The bottom half seems like it is displaying properly.

Odd. Anyone else seeing Ron’s problem? Ron, you say the bottom half displays fine… do any spelling suggestions from the actual post show up?

ck (3 comments) - December 9th, 2004

I installed it as instructed and Word Press is in my root so I didn’t really have to alter anything. However, when I click on the “check spelling button” the spell checker interface pops up but the top frame after checking for errors always returns a blank page, even when misspelt words were in the post. This happens in both latest Netscape and IE and IE displays an error message:

Line: 44 Char: 1 Error: Object expected URL: http://www.jewlicious.com/wp-content/plugins/spell/spellchecker.php

Any suggestions?

ColdForged (971 comments) - December 9th, 2004

Any suggestions?

I’ll investigate, thanks for the detailed information. Looks like I’ll need to install a test 1.2 installation .

Ron, you running 1.2, too?

ColdForged (971 comments) - December 9th, 2004

I’m sure I’ve missed something silly, but I’ve installed the plugin (several times now), and although it appears to activated, no spell check button appears on the “write post” screen.

Check the bottom of the screen, does it appear there? If so, that’s a known issue that will be addressed today. If not, can you view the page source and look for the word “spell” in there somewhere and tell me what you see?

Thor (19 comments) - December 9th, 2004

Coldforged: Viewing the page source for the compose screen, the word “spell” is not found, and the button is missing in action. Does the path have anything to do with the button’s appearing? I’ve tried using the absolute path with it making no difference for me.

ck: Unfortunately, the button does not appear either way.

ColdForged (971 comments) - December 9th, 2004

Coldforged: Viewing the page source for the compose screen, the word “spell” is not found, and the button is missing in action. Does the path have anything to do with the button’s appearing? I’ve tried using the absolute path with it making no difference for me.

No, basically if the plugin is installed in your “wp-content/plugins” directory and Activated in the plugins page, there shouldn’t be any way that it won’t appear on your “Write Post” page. I have a 1.3a5 as well as a 1.2 installation now, and it appears on both.

Ron (23 comments) - December 9th, 2004

I tried the updated plug in and it seemed to be working, but then I got:

System Error: Aspell program execution failed (‘aspell -a –lang=en_US < ./aspell_data_24|3qv2>&1′)

ColdForged (971 comments) - December 9th, 2004

System Error: Aspell program execution failed (‘aspell -a—lang=en_US &1’)

Just keeps getting weirder. What happens when you try to run aspell from your command line on your host?

and works only with WordPress 1.3 (which is also still in alpha)

Note that I have tested it on 1.2 now and it appears to function.

ColdForged (971 comments) - December 9th, 2004

I just installed the 0.2 version on WordPress 1.2, other than needing to install aspell, everything seems to work great, Thanks!

Excellent, thanks for letting us know!

CarLBanks (6 comments) - December 10th, 2004

Can you make a version that is in zip form?

Thor (19 comments) - December 10th, 2004

I downloaded, edited, uploaded and reactivate the new .3 version. I’m now getting a JavaScript error relating to english.dat. That file does not exist on my host server, at least not where I’d expect it to be. There are other files that might be relevant, but I don’t know enough yet to determine that.

A very BIG thank you for your help yesterday, by the way.

CarLBanks (6 comments) - December 10th, 2004

The zip file link can’t be found.

ColdForged (971 comments) - December 10th, 2004

Also what is the aspell_path?

Open up a terminal window to your web host. Type “which aspell”. It should respond with something like “/usr/bin/aspell”. It may say “/usr/local/bin/aspell”. It may say something else. Whatever it says before the “aspell” is the path. So, edit your wp-content/plugins/spell/spellchecker.php file and find the line that looks like this:

$aspell_path = '/usr/bin/';

and make sure that that path matches your host’s path.

AdamStac (42 comments) - December 11th, 2004

Hmmm…I got this to work…no problems! VERY cool plugin I might add!

A big thanks from me…

ColdForged (971 comments) - December 11th, 2004

Hey, my gravatar’s messed up here…

Doh! I assume you have a transparent one, eh? Never thought of that.

CarLBanks (6 comments) - December 11th, 2004

There’s a gzipped version of 0.5

Adam M. (1 comments) - December 11th, 2004

This is great! Any way to make this work on comments?

It’s not so much that my commenters can’t spell as it is that… um, I can’t.

ColdForged (971 comments) - December 11th, 2004

Meant to add that I don’t see a zipped version of 0.5.

Gah, again with the forgetting the zip version. My bad. Check again, it should be there now .

This is great! Any way to make this work on comments?

Yes, there is, though Shelley remained mum in her method. Fear not, though, I’ll probably make it a standard feature of a future version if Shelley doesn’t dish .

One thing that I ran into is that you can use a ’-H’ option if you are going to be checking any HTML (or any SGML, really) and it will filter through it.

Didn’t know that! Thanks for the tip, I’ll have to check that out and incorporate it.

ColdForged (971 comments) - December 12th, 2004

I’m not meaning to be a killjoy, but in what way is Spelling Checker better?

In no way. Use what works for you! But apparently a lot of people don’t know about those tools that you mention. Even if they did, some people don’t make that leap from “there’s a tool for my browser” and “I can use it for my WordPress installation.” But, give them a plug-in explicitly for what they’re trying to do — say, write a post in WordPress — and they find it useful.

Judging by the buzz and apparent popularity, there was seemingly an unfilled need.

Nat Carson (1 comments) - December 14th, 2004

I was also having problems. In several of the php files it assumes that wordpress is installed in the root directory of the website. Mine is installed in a subdirectory. I edited the paths by hand adding the extra directory level and got it to work. Seems like the plugin should detect what the WordPress root is then build paths from there on.

Ron (23 comments) - December 15th, 2004

I am also getting the 'wordWindowObj' is null or not an object' error. Other than that, everything seems to be working. I am hoping I can get this to work!

Thank you for your work on this, I have been looking for something like for a long time.

I’m not meaning to be a killjoy, but in what way is Spelling Checker better?

Spelling Checker is better for people like me because I travel at least 180 day s a year and do most of my web log accessing and posting on the road from public computers. Most of these do not have IeSpell or Fire Fox installed.

ColdForged (971 comments) - December 15th, 2004

It tells me I need a word list.. specifically for the language en_US

Hmm… first try would be to remove any file named “plugins/spell/aspell.personal” if it exists. That will force the plugin to create a new personal dictionary. If that doesn’t do it, I would try to track down where your aspell install is and determine if it has a master word list. Try this to see if there is a master word list:

aspell dump master

If there is you’ll get a load of stuff.

Another thing to try is to remove the entire “–lang=$lang” parameter from the file “plugins/spell/spellConfig.php” file. All instances of it and see if it makes any difference.

I’m no expert on all the myriad installation options of aspell, so it may take some experimentation on your part to determine options that work for you. Hope this helps!

Taylor (3 comments) - December 15th, 2004

If I can’t do those calls “which aspell” and “aspell dump” how can I figure this out?

ColdForged (971 comments) - December 16th, 2004

No joy with the Add Word feature.

Somehow I knew you’d be a troublemaker . IM me when you get a chance… I know we had difficulties with aspell personal dictionaries with you before.

So I think that I got the config right (check freshpolitics.us to see) but it says there is no Word List.

Unfortunately there’s no way to verify you have the aspell configuration correctly by looking at your site… you may have the other paths set up right such that the window comes up but still have an aspell configuration that is incorrect, as seems to be the case since it can’t find the word list. It may be time to get your hosting provider involved to see what their aspell support is. Ask them perhaps where their aspell master word list is located. Once you have that, then you can specify that in all of the aspell configuration variables as:

--dict-dir="path-to-the-word-list"

Mark (27 comments) - December 16th, 2004

I’ve added your Spell Check plugin and it works GREAT! It was a bear for me to install aspell on my shared Linux webhost account, but I figured out how to do it without being root.

However, I can’t seem to get personal dictionary to work. I click on “Add” and when the spell check is done, it says “Failed to add 3 words to dictionary.”

Also, this plugin only works with IE – which is not good. I prefer Firefox, but I set firefox to open popups in tabs. When I try to check spelling using Firefox, it opens a new tab that says:

This page cannot be displayed

The window was not opened from another window.

Any suggestions for the 2 things?

THANKS!!!

Ryan (4 comments) - December 16th, 2004

Very nice plugin. Installed in seconds (about 20 total) and it works great. Thanks!

ColdForged (971 comments) - December 17th, 2004

Sorry “create/merge personal” is currently unimplemented.

Mark, download the latest version. Then open your spellConfig.php and change this line:

[code lang="php"]$broken_aspell_personal_dictionary = false;[/code]

to have a value of true. Then come back and let me know if you have a better time . You and Thor are in the same boat, so this version is for you guys.

I installed aspell yesterday, and I downloaded it yesterday, so I would think I’m on the newest.

Yeah I don’t understand the dynamics of it… I run 0.50.3 and it supports creation/merging where “later” versions don’t. I can’t explain it.

The extension I’m using to do that is:

I’ll try it later and see if I can reproduce it and figure out what’s going on. Thanks for the info.

Mark (27 comments) - December 17th, 2004

Okay, I upgraded, and when I attempted to spell check, I got a popup that says:

Error executing ‘aspell -a –lang=en_US — personal=//wp-content/plugins/spell/aspell.personal < /tmp/aspell_data_QYqJqJ 2>&1` Error: /aspell.personal: The language “en_US” is not known. This is probably because: the file “//aspell6-en-6.0-0/en_US.dat” can not be opened for reading.

$ ls -la ~/aspell/aspell6-en-6.0-0/*.dat -rw------- aspell6-en-6.0-0/en.dat -rw-r----- aspell6-en-6.0-0/en_affix.dat -rw------- aspell6-en-6.0-0/en_phonet.dat

Should I alter something in a config file?

ColdForged (971 comments) - December 17th, 2004

singlewindow 1.4

As far as the SingleWindow incompatibility goes, it appears by my investigation to be a bug in the extension. He’s not forwarding the “opener” property to the new tab and I rely on that property to get at some needed information. I’ve forwarded something to his “guest book” so we’ll see what he says.

As far as the dictionary problems, I’m creating a minor revision to output more debug. The only things that would cause it to not be able to update the dictionary is: 1) unable to open the dictionary for writing, 2) unable to write additional lines to it, or 3) the dictionary doesn’t exist there. All of which seem hokey. Can you double-check permissions on that created file? Make sure everyone can write to it, maybe?

Mark (27 comments) - December 17th, 2004

I chmoded it to 666 but that didn’t fix it. So I chmoded it back. I don’t like giving the world write perms. Anyhow, it still didn’t work, even with the world having write perms.

ColdForged (971 comments) - December 17th, 2004

Anyhow, it still didn’t work, even with the world having write perms.

I’d like you to install a debug version. Grab this one and install it. Remember to set the $lang and turn on the “broken aspell” feature. Try it out and see if any new files show up in that spell directory. Hopefully it’ll show what went wrong.

ColdForged (971 comments) - December 17th, 2004

Hmm…

Would you mind sending me an email to sohmer@coldforged.org, please? This might be easier over a slightly more “interactive” medium. Thanks.

Bink (1 comments) - December 18th, 2004

I am experimenting with a new company. They put PHP in safemode but if I create a directory and name it a certain name, all files in the folder will run in outside of safe mode. So if the name of this folder is safemode-php. How can your plugin be modified or is it not possible still? Thanks!

tabatha (1 comments) - December 22nd, 2004

I downloaded the zip file, and it says it doesn’t have a current archive, and won’t let me unzip it. what does that mean?

Matt (23 comments) - December 24th, 2004

I installed the plugin but I’m running into the problem of it just showing no a blank sheet in the top portion of the spell check popup even though there are obviously misspelled words in the posting. I have verified by aspell information (which aspell returns “/usr/bin/aspell” so I tried both “/usr/bin/” and /usr/bin”) but I can’t seem to get it checking. Any ideas what direction I need to head in? This looks like an awesome plugin, would love to get it up and running.

Ron (23 comments) - December 27th, 2004

I had .7 running and when I upgraded to .9 I ran into the same errors as Mark.

Chris Poteet (2 comments) - December 30th, 2004

I’m having the same issue as Matt. I verified my ASPELL path (/usr/bin/aspell), and I get a JS error stating:

Line 13: Syntax Error Line 147: ‘wordWindowObj’ is undefined Line 144: Object expected

Also, do you mean to change the $aspell_path in the spellConfig.php/spellconfig.php? Your FAQ says to change the variable in the spellchecker.php file. Is there suppose to be two configuration files?

Shalom.

Patrick (5 comments) - December 31st, 2004

Hi its me again, i fixed it thank you! It was a simple mistake on my part. This is a fantastic plug in, you did a fine job, and thank you so much.

Bitmand (2 comments) - January 3rd, 2005

It seems like I have the same problem as Ron (or maybe something like it). I press the spell checker button; a pop up appears saying that spell checking in progress. A couple of seconds later a java script error occurs.

So I investigated a little and found this error in the middle of some java script code:

“Warning: fopen(/path/to/my/wp-installation/wp-content/plugins/spell/aspell.personal): failed to open stream: Permission denied in /path/to/my/wp-installation/wp-content/plugins/spell/spellchecker.php on line 67
“

It makes sense; of course my web server can’t create the aspell.personal file. So I created the file /path/to/my/wp-installation/wp-content/plugins/spell/aspell.personal and for some reason I had to write at least one word in it, so I wrote “test”. I saved the file and did a:

chown nobody:nobody /path/to/my/wp-installation/wp-content/plugins/spell/aspell.personal

nobody is the web server owner and I needed to change it to allow the webserver to read/write to the aspell.personal file. You can also make a chmod 777 of the file, but there might be some security issues there.

And now it works like a charm. I hope it can help some of you guys out there, it is indeed a great plug-in – and ColdForge: Congrats on you new home

noderat (5 comments) - January 3rd, 2005

Same problem as Matt..aspell is installed and the configuration has been set properly. I still get a blank page at the top of the spell checking page.

Keith (4 comments) - January 5th, 2005

After setting write permission on the spell directory, the spell checker was able to create the default aspell.personal file. However, I then ran into a couple of other errors. I had to remove the aspell.personal file and set the following on the spellConfig.php file:

• $broken_aspell_personal_dictionary = true;
• $lang = ‘en’; (instead of en_US as my version of aspell only has an en.dat file)

Then everything worked ok. Great plugin!

ColdForged (971 comments) - January 12th, 2005

I suppose it is possible, though the special characters present a unique challenge. By customizing the config I would think it would be possible to get it to work, but I have no way to test my theory.

George (5 comments) - January 20th, 2005

Expect some new hits now that you have hit the autoinstaller.

I just plugged it in, and got the “can’t add words” error, but I’m not too worried.

What I was interested in is how would you go about forcing spelling checks? IOW, you can’t post unless you spell check it. It would cause spammers using auto attacks to get dumped en masse. A human can just ignore it and allow the bum words in. Sure, it won’t catch trackback spam, but it could thwart comment spam. Or, it could force honest words, thus making blacklists and Bayesian filters more effective.

ColdForged (971 comments) - January 20th, 2005

I just plugged it in, and got the “can’t add words” error…

I’d be happy to help you track down what’s going on there if you desire.

What I was interested in is how would you go about forcing spelling checks?

Seems like it should be possible. Maybe some Javascript to insert the Submit Comment button only after the spell checker returns.

ColdForged (971 comments) - January 20th, 2005

you’re tossing some extra space before headers somewhere.

Blacklist plugin is misbehaving for some reason. Thanks for the heads up.

Jeff (6 comments) - January 20th, 2005

Oh my, I’m embarassed to ask this, but…how does one install aspell anyway? I went to their site, downloaded, expanded, stuck the files in the /usr/bin directory, and, as root, typed in./configure && make and got an error.

can anyone guide me to a resource for non-admin types on how to get this going?

TIA!

Jeff

ColdForged (971 comments) - January 21st, 2005

Or type “which aspell” to find the location. It might already be there.

Actually in the latest version that’s the way the plugin auto-detects the executable. In future versions I may have a backup plan for those hosts that don’t have appropriate paths set up to search in various likely places for the executable.

can anyone guide me to a resource for non-admin types on how to get this going?

George has some good points. If you can be a bit more specific on what you’re experiencing, we might be able to get you going.

ColdForged (971 comments) - January 22nd, 2005

That sounds suitably odd. First, what version of WP are you running? Second, if you go to your WordPress options, what are the values for WordPress address (URI): and Blog address (URI):? Also, for 1.1 the installation changed in terms of heirarchy… did you install everything in the right place and then remove the old “wp-content/plugins/spell/” directory?

We’ll sort this out, I have no doubt .

ColdForged (971 comments) - January 22nd, 2005

Ha-ha! Much better. Now, change the “language” option to be simply “english”. I bet you’ll have better luck!

ColdForged (971 comments) - January 22nd, 2005

Well, hell. Do you have shell access by any chance?

ColdForged (971 comments) - January 22nd, 2005

Hmm. I guess try “en” as the language. Somewhere, somehow there has to be a language that works appropriately.

Ted (4 comments) - January 22nd, 2005

My server administrator says that Aspell is outdated and not recommended. It is not installed on the server. We have Pspell. Will there be a future version using Pspell? How do I get stated converting to Pspell? Are there many functions and parameters to change?

noderat (5 comments) - January 23rd, 2005

I seem to be having the same “Failed to add x words to dictionary problem”

I tinkered with permissions on my personal dictionary but no luck. Perhaps you know something else I can try?

ColdForged (971 comments) - January 23rd, 2005

We have Pspell. Will there be a future version using Pspell?

Let me just ask one more thing, Ted. Is this “we have pspell” as in the pspell PHP calls? In other words, the built-in PHP functions when you compile PHP with the pspell libraries? Such that “pspell_check” and “pspell_suggest” work? If that’s the case then I could see ways of doing it. Unfortunately my hosting provider doesn’t support pspell support so I have no way of running in such an environment.

Matt (23 comments) - January 25th, 2005

I installed the plugin and ran the setup link which showed everything was OK. When I tried to “Check Spelling” I get an “Error: ïQ”. I tried the aspell command in a shell and get the same error. If I remove the –personal it works fine. Is there a way to remove the personal dictionary from the call (I’m not sure what file[s] I would have to change)? I’m using WP 1.2.2 with aspell 0.50.5 and lang en_US. Perhaps my aspell version is the problem? Thanks.

ColdForged (971 comments) - January 25th, 2005

Yes. I was referring to the Pspell PHP functions (Aspell functions are deprecated) and to add confusion, one version of the aspell library was called pspell.

Okay, I got you. Phew! That makes sense. Yes, in investigating the interesting history of aspell/pspell it’s amazing we wound up with anything at all. Who could keep up with all that ambiguity?

Yes, it’s entirely possible to utilize the PHP pspell functions. However, it is — as you’ve discovered — a fundamentally different method of use. It does give me hope that this is a possible fix for the PHP safe mode people… if they’re running in safe mode, maybe they have the PHP pspell functions.

The only problem is that my hosting provider doesn’t have pspell included in the PHP installation. Hence, creating and testing any pspell version will be impossible. That’s something I don’t quite know how to get around right now.

Jeff Wheeler (1 comments) - January 29th, 2005

Great plugin. One problem though: when served as application/xhtml+xml it fails, and in standard browsers like Firefox, it won’t load.

Thor (19 comments) - February 8th, 2005

I’m kind of stumped. It’s been quite a while since I went through getting the plugin installed the first time around, and I forget everything that had to be done for my atypical install. Just think, I even had some code named after me ;-/

I recently went to update spell-checker, and now as soon as I copy the “spell-plugin.php” file into your “wp-content/plugins” directory, my site goes belly-up, with the following error messages:

“Warning: main(/usr/www/users/tfarrow/thorfarrow.com/journal/wp-content/spell-plugin/spellInclude.php): failed to open stream: No such file or directory in /usr/www/users/tfarrow/thorfarrow.com/journal/wp-content/plugins/spell-plugin.php on line 36

Fatal error: main(): Failed opening required ‘/usr/www/users/tfarrow/thorfarrow.com/journal/wp-content/spell-plugin/spellInclude.php’ (include_path=’.:/usr/local/lib/php’) in /usr/www/users/tfarrow/thorfarrow.com/journal/wp-content/plugins/spell-plugin.php on line 36″

I did follow the instructions… honest, I did!

Thor (19 comments) - February 8th, 2005

Oops! I meant Brian! See what I mean about my new meds?

Sproke (4 comments) - February 10th, 2005

Hey there. I tried to install your fab plugin, but I got a blank window when I tried to go to the ‘speller_setup’ thing. I then looked in my directory, and there is no such file. I checked the .zip file, and there was no file. Also I assume it is a consequential problem, but I get a blank page when I try to post. I tried following your ‘FAQ 1)’ but I have no idea what it says, it’s so far over my head! Please help, and thanks very much in advance!

Sproke (4 comments) - February 12th, 2005

Hey there Coldforged. I’ve finished my exam, and I’m keep to get your plugin working! I’m using WP 1.2.1, and the button is in place fine. However when I ask it to check words it comes up with this message “System Error: Aspell programe excecution failed (‘usr/bin/aspell -a –lan=en_US –personal =c:\domains\ordinarylife.co.nz\wwwroot\blog\wp-content/spell-plugin/aspell.personal &1`) “

It seems to be a smiliar message to what Ron was getting (reply 28&32) though the message is a little different, with the ‘c:\domain’ thing which seems to be slight variation of the path to the aspell file.

Help please! http://www.ordinarylife.co.nz

cavemonkey50 (13 comments) - February 13th, 2005

Just a heads up but the latest nightlys do not have auth.php in them. This makes it impossible to add words via the checker since auth.php is missing. The only way to add words at the moment is through the plugin interface.

Podz (1 comments) - February 14th, 2005

Hi – was told my checker had an error too. Using CVS from Friday night (I think) and I se this message:

“Error executing /usr/bin/aspell -a --lang=en_US --personal=/home/virtual/site95/fst/var/www/html/T2/wp-content/spell-plugin/aspell.personal &1/usr/share/aspell/en_US.dat: The required field “name” is missing.”

My plugin are listed here: http://www.tamba2.org.uk/T2/about-t2/

but it’s more of a “found an issue” post here rather than an Help!

I LOVE the horizontal details … mind if a copy that ?

cavemonkey50 (13 comments) - February 14th, 2005

I downloaded the updated plugin and now the addition of words works fine. Thanks for the speedy update. B.T.W. Your ZIP file is missing. I had to download the TAR.

Mike (37 comments) - February 15th, 2005

After upgrading to 1.5 Strayhorn it seems that it’s broken again. using release 1.14 everything is installed as per the instructions yet the spell check page comes up blank in the top frame (spell check controls in the bottom)

Mike (37 comments) - February 15th, 2005

oops! sorry, looks like it’s on my end. aspell isn’t executing.

Mark (27 comments) - February 19th, 2005

Doesn’t work if your blog is in a subdirectory. You’re using bloginfo(‘url’) when you should be using bloginfo(‘wpurl’). It works only because sometimes those settings are the same.

cavemonkey50 (13 comments) - February 19th, 2005

This may be something completely out of your control, but on the edit comment pages the check spelling button appears on the very bottom of the page, under the Firefox and other stuff. This also appears on the delete comment pages even though no editing takes place on that page.

Robert (11 comments) - February 19th, 2005

I also noticed by looking at my PHPInfo page that my host has PSpell installed, but nothing for ASpell. They are essentially the same thing, are they not?

Ted (4 comments) - February 19th, 2005

I just saw a previous post on bloginfo(). What you need to write now is a grammar checker in multi-languages. Just kidding.

rgalgon (6 comments) - February 20th, 2005

After doing the one-click install via wp-plugin-mgr everything seems to go ok, however when I try and goto the config page spell …plugins/spell-plugin.php?speller_setup I get a 404 Page Not Found error. The file has 755 permissions and does exist, as I can goto ..spell-plugin.php and it loads a blank page. Any ideas?

MtDewVirus (6 comments) - February 20th, 2005

I enabled shell_exec in my php.ini file, retarted Apache, and VOILA! A different error message now. I just had to change my language to English for that one though.

Great plugin!

Scott (26 comments) - February 20th, 2005

I just upgraded to WP 1.5 last night and the spell checker stopped working. I tried deactivating, removing and reinstalling but it still isn’t working. I can get to the spell checker options w/out a problem. Nothing happens when I it the check spelling button. If I look at the error log in IE or Firefox this is the error:

Error: spellChecker is not defined Source File: http://techory.com/blog/wp-admin/post.php Line: 42

I currently have the spell checker running on another wp 1.5 blog on my site w/out any problems. I think it’s an older version of the plugin though. Is there anything that would cause this to happen? Remnants of a the previous install, or weirdness due to the version update?

Glen (2 comments) - February 20th, 2005

I’m getting the same Java console error that Scott reported above, for both the main post writing spell check:

Error: spellChecker is not defined Source File: http://blog.gpiper.org/blog/wp-admin/post.php Line: 53

and for the comments spell check:

Error: spellChecker is not defined Source File: http://blog.gpiper.org/blog/index.php/2005/02/19/changes-in-progress/#comments Line: 153

Ideas?

TIA, -ghp

Scott (26 comments) - February 21st, 2005

WordPress URI: http://techory.com/blog Blog Address: http://techory.com/blog Path to spellchecker.js: /home/techory/public_html/blog/wp-content/spell-plugin/spellchecker.js Web root: /home/techory/public_html/

Thanks!

Glen (2 comments) - February 21st, 2005

It works here, too!

Thanks for the quick fix/update, ColdForged — you & your plugin both rock!

-ghp

Robert (11 comments) - February 21st, 2005

I get a slightly different error during a spell-check: “Error executing `/usr/loacl/bin/aspell -a—lang=en\_US—personal=/home/invisine/public_html/weblog/wp-content/spell-plugin/aspel.personal &1’ Error: No Word lists can be found for the language ‘en’. It also occurs if I use the default en\_US. Any ideas?

Try “english” as the language.

Same error, but now the error reads like this (with english being truncated to ‘en’):

“Error executing `/usr/loacl/bin/aspell -a—lang=en_US—personal=/home/invisine/public_html/weblog/wp-content/spell-plugin/aspel.personal &1’ Error: No Word lists can be found for the language ‘en’.”

So en_US, en, and english do not work. Any other ideas? I do have a email in to my hosting provider as well but their response to an earlier question was the the dictionary was en_US or en_US-w_accents. Both are truncated to ‘en’ and throw the same error.

Robert (11 comments) - February 21st, 2005

I did try that with the same result.

I did track it down in th code so I know where the error is being thrown.

It looks to me like whatever is being returned by the call to aspell is being assumed as error output.

Robert (11 comments) - February 21st, 2005

No shell, BTW.

jennifer (5 comments) - February 25th, 2005

I installed the plugin, now I cannot “write” or edit a post Help!

I have installed, deleted, reinstalled, ect.

Sphinx7 (2 comments) - February 27th, 2005

First, I want to say thanks for the plugin. Glad you created it.

I installed the plugin, and did everything the directions said. I changed the permissions on the spell-plugin folder to 755. It is located in the wp-content folder. However, I keep getting the following message:

FATAL: The temporary directory you specified is not writable from the Apache task. Either select a different temporary directory (like “/tmp”) or make the directory you specified writable by the Apache task (chmod 755 the directory).

For grins, I changed the permissions to the folder to 757 and the fatal error messages went away. Any ideas as to how I can address this?

TIA

Sphinx7 (2 comments) - February 27th, 2005

Whoa! That was quick!

But would not that be a major security concern to allow write and execute privileges to that directory?

Thanks again.

Sam (5 comments) - March 1st, 2005

I just installed on a 1.5 install that is on a debian sarge machine. When trying the plugin I got a javascript error about “error: ?|x&uange ‘en_US’ is not known”.

When I try running the same command from the command line I get the following (running as sudo and non-sudo):

laurelpoint:/var/www/howellcottage.org/blog/wp-content/spell-plugin# sudo -u www-data /usr/bin/aspell -a –lang=en_US –personal=/var/www/howellcottage.org/blog/wp-content/spell-plugin/aspell.personal

Error: Ø °uage “en_US” is not known. This is probably becuase the file “/usr/share/aspell/en_US.dat” can not be opened for reading

Any suggestions?

Sam (5 comments) - March 2nd, 2005

Changing to “en” was the fix; sorry for having to bother you about it. Thank your for the hint for fixing the problem.

FYI, the version of aspell that comes with Debian Sarge is currently 0.50.5-5. In addition the plugin was not able to spell check the HTMLArea 3.0RC1 based editor that I had installed (WP-HTMLArea by Akmal H AK ). The plugin does not seem to be available for download anymore, so maybe that is not a big problem and I should just look for an alternative.

Again, thanks!

Philip Peeples (2 comments) - March 11th, 2005

Is it possible to use this without the use of shell_exec? It seems that many cpanel hosts have this function disabled for security reasons????

There must be another way to implement this…

Please let us poor cpanel users know Thanks!

cavemonkey50 (13 comments) - March 11th, 2005

That bug in WP which made it that you couldn’t find the spot to put the check spelling button has been fixed in the latest nightlies. Could you add the quick fix so us users who are running the nightlies can enjoy the fix? Thanks.

cavemonkey50 (13 comments) - March 14th, 2005

Thanks for the update.

E. Alvin Davis (1 comments) - March 17th, 2005

Hi. I love your Spelling Checker pulgin. I just installed it and it works great except on several posts I get a “error on page” message. I have no idea what is causing this. any ideas?

Matt (23 comments) - March 19th, 2005

Hi ColdForged,

Thanks for writing this plugin. I’m excited to use it.

Like Sphinx7 above, I was uable to configure the plugin for the first time until I chmod’d wp-content/spell-plugin to 757.

In response to Sphinx7, you wrote:

Someone would have to know that that directory existed and that it was writeable, but yes it could create problems. That’s why you have the option to change which directory you wish to store the temporary files and personal dictionary. That way you can have one directory somewhere in your installation that is writeable by anyone but that doesn’t contain anything else of value. Oh, and you certainly don’t need to provide execute privileges by any stretch… that was primarily for installations that run PHP scripts as “you.”

I tried to change the directory for the temp files, but even after chmoding that directory to 757, it didn’t work. The plugin only works for me if I have wp-content/spell-plugin as 757. (when I tried to take out the execute permission, I got an error message)

Leaving that folder as 757 makes me a little uncomfortable. Should I be worried?

Matt (23 comments) - March 19th, 2005

Thanks, coldforged. I’ve got it working now, and have the 757 folder above my public_html directory. I tried to do that before, but it didn’t work–I think I wrote the link (/home/matt/) incorrectly.

But now I’ve got the plugin going, and I feel safe. Thanks for the plugin and for your quick response. You rock!

Sidney Markowitz (4 comments) - March 29th, 2005

I got the plugin to work in safe mode! It would be better to get it to use pspell, and I intend to look at that, but in the meantime, I posted the details on my weblog.

You should be able to incorporate the few changes into your code to make it compatible with and without safe mode.

Mario "miope" Bonilla (1 comments) - March 31st, 2005

Very easy to correct XHTML compliance problem:

The attribute “onClick” isn’t valid in the input tag.

The solution is to replace onclick for onselect in spell-plugin.php:

input type=”button” value=”Check Spelling” onselect=”openSpellChecker();” /> [...] input type=”button” value=”Check Spelling” onselect=”openSpellChecker();” />

Thanks for the plugin!

P.D. 1 It is possible to let the user choose the language of the spell checker in each post/comment? P.D.2 Sorry, but I didn’t found how to insert blocks of code in the comment

Chris (15 comments) - March 31st, 2005

I have it installed and I have no errors but when I purposely misspell a word, no misspelled words are found. This kind of defeats the purpose.

TigerDE2 (1 comments) - April 7th, 2005

Aspell Language Setting Ignored? Hi! I’ve set the aspell language to de_DE on the options screen. However, the plugin actually uses the English language for spell checking. (It only proposes English words.) My web host has installed both, aspell-de and aspell-en. Any ideas what’s going wrong? Regards, Christian

Stephen (4 comments) - April 14th, 2005

I’ve downloaded and installed manually as the One Click Install gives me the following error:

Warning: exec() has been disabled for security reasons in /home/public_html/mule/wp-plugin-mgr.php on line 459 This package does not contain a plugin file (might be a standalone script) Please click here to see the directions for this plugin and proceed with additional install steps if necessary.

After I install it manually I get massive errors when I run the setup can and then it kill my whole wordpress installation until I remove all traces.

Brendan (4 comments) - April 18th, 2005

Is there any plan to attempt a work around php_safe_mode?

I have the Firefox speller plugin, so it’s not really a major, but I have come across an increasing number of web hosts switching on safe mode in an attempt to keep php scripts under controll (most likely we can thank spammers for that).

My webhost has recently switched servers, and they have enabled safe mode.

Sidney Markowitz (4 comments) - April 19th, 2005

Brendan, I did workaround safemode, as I mentioned in comment 236, with details in this entry on my blog. The changes I made are compatible with running not under safemode, so I think that ColdForged could put them into his version, and maybe feed it back to the original Speller Pages project.

The only limitation of my changes is that you have to be able to exec a shell script in the current directory (which is the wp plugins directory). Some ISPs may not only run safemode but also restrict exec more than that.

Stephen (4 comments) - April 19th, 2005

I installed the files as instructed in the readme_install.txt:

Copy the “spell-plugin.php” file into your “wp-content/plugins” directory. Create a new directory in your “wp-content” directory called “spell-plugin” Copy the remaining files into this directory.

Nathan (8 comments) - April 22nd, 2005

TigerDE2: I had the same problem with my language setting being ignored. It seems that the version of aspell installed on my server is very old as the server is running Debian. $ aspell –version @(#) International Ispell Version 3.1.20 (but really Aspell .33.7.1 alpha) This version seems to have a bug where the locale setting ($LANG) is always used in precedence to the –lang command line option, and PHP scripts run as the default system locale.

Fortunately the fix turns out to be fairly easy, prepend “LANG=en_GB” (or equivalent) to the path to your aspell executabe. (“Name and path to aspell executable” option.)

ColdForged: Cheers for this excellent plugin. One small problem I did have though was that the link to the Configuration Page on the Plugins page gives a blank page. It was only when I spotted a reference to looking on the main WP Options page that I realised that the config page had moved. Cheers, — Nathan

Fyse (3 comments) - May 7th, 2005

Hey, I’ve got your plugin installed, and it’s working great. I now don’t miss anything about Blogger!

I see on the options, though, that I should be able change from en_US dictionary to another one. I’d like to use a UK english dictionary, and was wondering how to do this? I’ve tried searching for answers elsewhere, but can’t find anything to help. I’ve also tried the obvious changing it to en_UK, but to no avail.

Any advice much appreciated!

Fyse (3 comments) - May 8th, 2005

Sorry, me again. Now got it sorted. I thought I had read all the previous comments carefully enough, but then searched and found Nathan’s solution. Amazingly enough, I think he’s actually running his installation on exactly the same web server as me! Apologies for the three pointless comments.

DNA (3 comments) - May 9th, 2005

Brilliant plugin – if only I could get it to work.

Followed the instructions to the letter, asked my host and they said aspell was available, made sure the webserver had right access to the personal dictionary file, and generally tried every alternative possible.

Everytime I run the spell checker, a popup appears where it says ‘Spell checking…’ and then ‘Internal Server Error’ in both upper and lower frames.

What do I do?

DNA (3 comments) - May 10th, 2005

I reread earlier comments and I can see there’ snot much that can be done.

Thanks anyway and sorry for the trouble.

Dayna (3 comments) - May 10th, 2005

I’ve tried changing that to en or english but it still doesn’t work. Other than that, some how, it’s conflicting with OSA (anti spam plugin)… But thanks for the quick answer =)

Dayna (3 comments) - May 12th, 2005

Hi, I re installed the plugin in and it worked =) but I could not add words to the personal dictionary, after adding those words the same error occurs.. but it works fine if I did not edit that page…

Scott (26 comments) - May 17th, 2005

one thing to add my /var/www/wodpress is a link to /usr/share/wordpress on a debian box – could that be an issue?

Scott (26 comments) - May 17th, 2005

Yep I checked and all the files are in the right folder and place

/usr/share/wordpress/wp-content/plugins: spell-plugin.php

/usr/share/wordpress/wp-content/plugins/spell-plugin all the files including spellinclude.php

i do have my wordpress folder linked in my /var/www but that shouldn’t hurt it should it?

http://www.thunderpunch.net

Scott (26 comments) - May 17th, 2005

OK I got it working after some hacking of the spellcheck.php code. I read it’s giving me the error about en_US.dat not being open for data due to my php being in safe mode? So it looks like the personal dictioanry you built with the words in it to ignore is beraking things because of safe mode?

Melbell (2 comments) - May 26th, 2005

If I add a word to my personal dictionary that has an apostrophe in it, it breaks the spell checker. “Breaks” meaning, the window comes up, but it stays blank and there’s an “object expected” Javascript error.

Is anyone else having this problem? Is there a fix for it?

Mark (27 comments) - May 26th, 2005

Interesting, it works GREAT with IE. Oh no! Please don’t make me go back to IE!!!

Nathan Lanier (1 comments) - May 29th, 2005

Hello,

This looks to be a great plug-in, but I’ve run into a few problems during installation. I can’t seem to get the Plug-In to show up as an option in my WP Plug-In manager. I downloaded the zip files and uploaded them accordingly. Any help would be great.

Mark (27 comments) - May 31st, 2005

Just a thought… My ISP provides squirrelmail 1.4.4 for our webmail access.

I noticed that my squirrelmail has a spell check and it allows me to add words to my dictionary regardless of the browser. I’ve never had a problem.

I don’t know anything about how suirrelmail implements spell check, but perhaps someone more knowledgeable does.

It may offer some insights.

Eric (4 comments) - May 31st, 2005

Hi there! I have always used your Spell Check plugin and love it1 When I add the button to the comments so the user can spell check the style that all of my input buttons are supposed to pick up isn’t applied. I’d like it if the Spell Checker button is styled the same way as the submit button next to it. Is there a way to do this?

Eric (4 comments) - June 1st, 2005

Oh awesome it worked! Thanks a bunch ColdForged. i can once again flawlessly implement this awesome plugin . PHP really confuses me lol. I need to take the time to learn it…Thanks again!

spell checks comment

Father Luke (17 comments) - June 1st, 2005

I get this error:

Error executing usr/bin/aspel-a--lang=english --personal= /cloaked/cloaked2/public_html/wpcontent/spell-plugin/aspel-wordlist.txt </cloaked/cloaked2/public_html/wpcontent/spell-plugin/aspel-wordlist.txt is not in the proper format.

I know that this is trying to get me to make my personal dictionary in the proper format.

What is my personal dictionary and how can I get it in the proper format?

Thanks!

Father Luke (17 comments) - June 2nd, 2005

It’s created by the plugin — or by the aspell executable — when first configured. First thing to try would be turning on the “broken aspell installation” option in the speller options pages.

Did that. What I am having trouble with is that if I just leave the Name and path to aspell personal dictionary as a path with no file then I get the error:

FATAL: You forgot to make the personal dictionary directory writable. Please read the install instructions and chmod this folder to provide write privileges to the Apache task.

But the folder I’ve set to both 777 and 755 with the same results. When I put the path indicating a file. i.e. aspel-wordlist.tx, the fatal error goes away but then I get the weird error.

P.S. Without indicating a file, the spellcheck button doesn’t show up.

Am I a problem or what?

Does that make sense?

Ken (8 comments) - June 4th, 2005

Hi Coldforged! Great Plugin! An error:

sh: line1: /usr/bin/aspell: Permission denied

Checked with the host, they’ve disabled access to aspell cause it’s “very inefficient and hard on the server”. Bummer. Maybe someday “when I’m rich” I can afford their Dedicated “Virtual” Hosting!

Still a great plugin! Installation was a breeze. Thanks.

Richard Silverstein (8 comments) - June 8th, 2005

I’ve installed & activated the plug in. I’ve gone to the configuration site & confirmed it was installed properly (at least I think that’s where I went). I see the spellcheck button in my wp interface. But when I click it a popup window opens & I see this msg:

“Internal Server Error The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request.

Please contact the server administrator, webmaster@richardsilverstein.com and inform them of the time the error occurred, and anything you might have done that may have caused the error.

More information about this error may be available in the server error log.

Additionally, a 404 Not Found error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.”

Any ideas what’s wrong?

Marc (18 comments) - June 10th, 2005

Went thru about 5 pages in this thread and as yet have not found an answer.

Install of the plugin went well. When attempting to check an entries spelling the Javascript window pops up and starts the process. then is stops and gives a application error that in essence says the “aspell.personnel” file is “not in the proper format.” I changed all three variations of aspell language options with no luck.

Is this as I suspect a host server problem and if so how do I explain what they need to do to assist.

Thanks.

Father Luke (17 comments) - June 10th, 2005

I get this error: Error executing usr/bin/aspel-a--lang=english --personal=/cloaked/cloaked2/publichtml/wpcontent/ spell-plugin/aspel.personal/cloaked/cloaked2/publichtml/ wpcontent/spell-plugin/aspel.personal is not in the proper format.

Marc (18 comments) - June 11th, 2005

In answer to your questions: The aspell.personal file is empty. Path to that file is this /home/cranial/public_html/fullthrottle/wp/wp-content/spell-plugin/aspell.personal

I have tried all three variations of language (en_US, en and english) without a change, I still get the same error.

ealvin (1 comments) - June 12th, 2005

Hi. First, thanks so much for this great plugin. I’ve been using it for about six months on my blog. I’m starting a new blog. I downloaded all of my old blog WP stuff and uploaded it to the new blog, hoping I could easily modify what’s there rather than going through the whole process of reinstalling everything. Unfortunately, that didn’t work. Since I have all of the files already in my WP install, can you think of something I can change to make it work on my new blog? I used Plugin Mgr before but that’s not working now. Thanks for any help and my best to you.

Richard Silverstein (8 comments) - June 13th, 2005

Hard to say, Richard. As I asked before, did anything show up in your error log following the “Internal Server Error”?

I guess I didn’t make myself clear. Only the first time I had a problem with spellcheck did I get a server error. Now, I don’t get a server error. The spell check interface opens when I click the spellcheck button, but my post doesn’t appear in the pop up box & I can’t do the spell check on the post text.

Jesse (4 comments) - June 27th, 2005

I swear I am following the installation instructions properly, but I keep getting this error. I get this as soon as I try to get into the wordpress admin section. I have to delete the spell-plugin.php file in order for it to go away.

What gives? Thanks for any help you can provide.

Warning: main(/home/jessehaf/public_html/darkdose.com/wp-content/spell-plugin/spellInclude.php): failed to open stream: No such file or directory in /home/jessehaf/public_html/darkdose.com/wp-content/plugins/spell-plugin.php on line 36

Warning: main(/home/jessehaf/public_html/darkdose.com/wp-content/spell-plugin/spellInclude.php): failed to open stream: No such file or directory in /home/jessehaf/public_html/darkdose.com/wp-content/plugins/spell-plugin.php on line 36

Fatal error: main(): Failed opening required '/home/jessehaf/public_html/darkdose.com/wp-content/spell-plugin/spellInclude.php' (include_path='.:/usr/lib/php:/usr/local/lib/php') in /home/jessehaf/public_html/darkdose.com/wp-content/plugins/spell-plugin.php on line 36

matt (23 comments) - June 28th, 2005

I get these messages

first FATAL: The temporary directory you specified is not writeable from the Apache task. Either select a different temporary directory (like “/tmp”) or make the directory you specified writable by the Apache task (chmod 755 the directory).

(tmp director??)

next FATAL: You forgot to make the personal dictionary directory writable. Please read the install instructions and chmod this folder to provide write privileges to the Apache task.

the /wp-content/spell-check folder is 755

advise please

Matt (23 comments) - July 6th, 2005

Hi,

I’m getting the following error message. I’m wondering if it might have been caused by a recent server upgrade. Do you know what’s going on?

Error executing /usr/bin/aspell -a -- lang=english --personal=/home/matt/spell/aspell.personal < /home/matt/spell/aspell_data_zHJVmL 2>&1

Error: 0U??uage “english” is not known. This is probably becuase the file “/usr/share/aspell/english.dat” can not be opened for reading

I’m using WP 1.5.1.3, and just tried re-installing the spell checker plugin.

I don’t see “english.dat” among the spell checker files…does this error indicate that the plugin is having problems locating a dictionary that’s supposed to be on my server? (the root folder of my account, as you’ve probably guessed, is “Matt”)

thanks very much in advance for your help.

John (19 comments) - July 14th, 2005

On the plug in page, the code for modifying for use for comments is returning an error on your web page. (it’s returning: [code lang=”php”] Parse error: parse error, unexpected TSTRING in /home2/coldfor/publichtml/wp-content/plugins/runphp.php(72) : eval()’d code on line 1 comments about this plugin.

sxz (2 comments) - July 20th, 2005

Warning: main(/home/jacksonl/public_html/jacklog/wp-content/spell-plugin/spellInclude.php): failed to open stream: No such file or directory in /home/jacksonl/public_html/jacklog/wp-content/plugins/spell-plugin.php on line 36

Warning: main(/home/jacksonl/public_html/jacklog/wp-content/spell-plugin/spellInclude.php): failed to open stream: No such file or directory in /home/jacksonl/public_html/jacklog/wp-content/plugins/spell-plugin.php on line 36

Fatal error: main(): Failed opening required '/home/jacksonl/public_html/jacklog/wp-content/spell-plugin/spellInclude.php' (include_path='.:/usr/lib/php:/usr/local/lib/php') in /home/jacksonl/public_html/jacklog/wp-content/plugins/spell-plugin.php on line 36

These are the errors showing after I have activated this spellchecker. I am using WP1.5.1.3 and latest IE. I had to manually delete the spellchecker to get my blog running again. I have followed all your instructions in the readme.txt file.

Can you tell me what is going on?

sxz

There are the errors I got when I turn on this plugin,

Brian Horlings (1 comments) - July 20th, 2005

I get an error similar to that in post 328 but it says error: 8. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks

sskhalsa (2 comments) - July 21st, 2005

I am still getting the Internal Server Error….any help with that??

I run myriad php scripts on my server so I dont think my servers is messed.

any help?

thanks

wl (3 comments) - July 22nd, 2005

Thanks very much for creating this plug-in.

I’ve been unable, however, to get it working on my site for a couple of weeks. Tried everything that I understand, including reinstalling, changing my folder preference to 0777, and trying my best to follow the read-me instructions carefully. Still get the following error (It’s long!):

Error executing ‘/usr/bin/aspell -a –lang=enUS –personal=/home/screenwr/publichtml/wp-content/spell-plugin/aspell < /home/screenwr/publichtml/wp-content/spell-plugin/aspelldata_4pp 2>&1′

Error: [down arrow]#R

I tried going through the help posts, but I’m a bit of a newbie and didn’t see one that seemed to address exactly the same problem. Can you help?

Thanks! WHL

Alex (3 comments) - July 22nd, 2005

Thanks very much for sharing this plug-in.

Bill Hendricks (2 comments) - July 28th, 2005

Thank you… I got it… from message 280

You said, “cott, please read my response again. The other files do not go in

/usr/share/wordpress/wp-content/plugins/spell-plugin

they go in

/usr/share/wordpress/wp-content/spell-plugin.”

软件视频会议系统 (2 comments) - July 30th, 2005

I guess I didn’t make myself clear. Only the first time I had a problem with spellcheck did I get a server error. Now, I don’t get a server error. The spell check interface opens when I click the spellcheck button, but my post doesn’t appear in the pop up box & I can’t do the spell check on the post text.

Greg (9 comments) - July 31st, 2005

Hello,

I am running WordPress 1.5.1.3 on my server with your spell-plugin 1.1.8. It is much better than past tries and I like it. I did however notice one small problem. The plugin works great when there is a misspelled word. It does exactly as it should, and when there is no misspellings it says so. But sometimes it gives the error Object Expected in line 80 char 1. This error is in IE 6.

Thank you.

Ron Pemberton (7 comments) - August 1st, 2005

Hi, First Thank You, for all your hard and most excellent work!

My host http://www.totalchoicehosting.com has removed aspell from their servers. They said it caused problems. They no longer support it.

Q: Is there some alternate to aspell that can be used? If so, what and how?

Thanks! Ron

Stephen Bach (1 comments) - August 3rd, 2005

When I try to run the spell checker, the upper window says spell check in progress… then goes blank, IE says:

“Line: 41 Char: 1 Error: Object Expected Code: 0 URL: http://www.bachtalk.net/wp-content/spell-plugin/spellchecker.php“

I have verified that the aspell is installed cprrectly, the options autodetect it. Also, the dictionary is in a directory the server can write to. Any ideas?

wl (3 comments) - August 6th, 2005

Hi, thanks, but sadly, I had it set to “en” already, and when I change it to “english,” I get an error “Q”. Tried “eng,” but that gave me an error “2 0″. Can’t figure this one out. Any other ideas?

John (19 comments) - September 21st, 2005

OK, things have changed a little. Went back to try again and now its picking up spelling errors, allows me to select the necessary changes and add to the dictionary etc in the dialog screen, but when I finish I get the message that the new words could not be saved and the spelling corrections I made have not been implemented to the post.

Here’s hoping you have the magic cure!!!

Thanks again.

nik (1 comments) - September 30th, 2005

First off, great site and plugin. However, when I try to use it, I get “Error executing ‘/usr/local/bin/aspell -a –lang=enUS 6 –personal=/usr/home/zoneforu/publichtml/jumboshrimp/wp-content/spell-plugin/aspell.personal &1′

Error: usr/home/zoneforu/publichtml/jumboshrimp/wp-content/spell-plugin/aspell.personal: the language “enUS” is not known. This is probably because: the file “/usr/local/lib/aspell-0.60/en_US.dat” cannot be opened for reading.”

What is en_US.dat? I can’t find it – which is strange.

La Bella (2 comments) - October 5th, 2005

Hi there! I’m not sure if my comment went through the first time… so I’ll try again. Today I downloaded your plugin and tried to install it… which I did with success however, under “Write a post” section, all I get is the “Check Spelling” button but it doesn’t actually work. It doesn’t generate the spell checker.

Any idea what I could have done wrong? Any help would be appreciated. Thank You.

Andrew Ferguson (2 comments) - October 5th, 2005

I’m getting: Error executing /usr/bin/aspell -a --lang=en_US --personal=/home/andrewfe/www/wp-content/spell-plugin/aspell.personal </home/andrewfe/www/wp-conent/spell-plugin/aspell_data_f9plzM 2>&1

Error:

…and then no error message.

Andrew Ferguson (2 comments) - October 6th, 2005

Try changing the language to en or english.

“en” was the trick! Thank you very very much.

Patrick (5 comments) - October 13th, 2005

Well I uninstalled it all and reinstalled it nd it works now, or at least the setp part worked. Now when I type a message, and click ‘check spelling’ I a little popup window opens, but then I get a lenghty error message that ends with ‘ Error: No word list can be found for the language “en_US”. This is what it autodetected, so does anyone have any suggestions?

Patrick

Henning (2 comments) - October 18th, 2005

I seem to be having an odd problem in that the config page for the spell checker thinks that it cannot write to the aspell personal directory but if I add words to the directory via the text area in the config page the words will appear within the personal dictionary file that I created. Since this creates a fatal error it looks like the plugin never gets fully activated. Any idea on how to fix this?

injinuity (4 comments) - October 19th, 2005

Thanks, I was able to change the name of the button… but I dint know if its a bug or not but the checking of spelling is taking ages for me… a one line of text takes around a minute… http://www.arrogantly.com

Brian (10 comments) - October 26th, 2005

Please HELP! I have installed and configured your plugin per your instructions and I am still getting errors. I consistently get three (3) errors in Firefox’s JavaScript Console:

1.) Error: syntax error Source File: http://upperallenfire.com/wp/wp-content/spell-plugin/spellchecker.php Line: 13 Source Code:

2.) Error: wordWindowObj is not defined Source File: http://upperallenfire.com/wp/wp-content/spell-plugin/spellchecker.php Line: 44

3.) Error: init_spell is not defined

I’ve read all the comments on here and tried all your suggestions in the FAQ. My problem is similar to your second FAQ in that when you click on Check Spelling it opens, but the top window stays blank – as if it can’t find aspell.

The options pickup /usr/bin/aspell as what it should be and I verified this through the Shell Access using the “which aspell” command.

I’ve checked, double-checked and triple-checked file permissions and moved the tmp and personal paths around to different places on my web server, all without any luck.

I’ve even contacted my webhost (they use cPanel) to see if they had some sort of security thing in place blocking me from using aspell, to which they said that they do not. They did verify that I do have the path correct to aspell.

I’m at the end of the line, I hope you are able to help! Thanks again! Brian – upperallenfire.com/wp

rich (2 comments) - November 2nd, 2005

Is there a way to remove the ‘add’ button from the interface?

Maxime (2 comments) - November 9th, 2005

How to remove a button from the interface ?

Very Mom (2 comments) - November 12th, 2005

Hi there, have just installed the Spell Checker and read the threads at the WP forums but I can’t seem to solve one [hopefully] final problem. I needed to chmod the spell-plugin folder to 777 as well as the plugins folder to get rid of the errors on the speller_setup page, I also enabled the manual personal dictionary. I am still getting the following error when I try to run the spell checker on a post:

Error executing ‘/usr/bin/aspell -a –lang +enUS -personal+/home/verymom/publichtml/wp-content/spell-plugin/aspel.personal &1′ Error: ?g?

I can’t make heads or tails of that one. I’m also gathering from the WP threads that a folder was supposed to be created inside the spell-plugin folder? Something for the personal dictionary? This has not occured, though I’m not sure if I’m reading that right.

Any help would be appreciated, thank you so much.

TJ (2 comments) - November 13th, 2005

First install on WP 1.5.2, and there are immediate problems after activation when trying to access the configuration page.

Warning: main(…\wp-content/spell-plugin/spellInclude.php) [function.main]: failed to open stream: No such file or directory in …\wp-content\plugins\spell-plugin.php on line 36

Note the missing “plugins/” folder in that path. It seems to be caused bv line 36′s require((dirname(dirname(FILE)) which, with spell-plugin.php in the plugins/ folder, resolves to the parent of the parent – the wp-content/ folder.

If I fix that I then get similar errors from spellInclude.php.

If I fix spellInclude.php by adding an extra dirname( on line 7 then I can get the configuration page.

However I now find the temporary and dictionary folders are incorrect and I get big red warnings about them not being writeable – because the paths are missing the “plugins/” folder.

Is this just me or a hiccup in the package?

Very Mom (2 comments) - November 14th, 2005

Thank you, changing it to just “english” worked.

Laundro (2 comments) - November 17th, 2005

I am getting the following error:

“Error executing ‘/usr/bin/apell -a –lang=enus –personal=/home/xxx/publichtml/wp-content/spell-plugin/aspell.personal < /tmp/aspelldataqpT9BF 2>&1′

Error: X

What does this mean and how can I fix it? I’ve tried everything and have talked to my hosting coming and came up with nothing!

Thanks!

Laundro (2 comments) - November 17th, 2005

Bingo!

Thanks so much! This has been racking my brain for weeks now…

Carlton Bale (1 comments) - November 19th, 2005

Looking forward to a version that does not require disabling PHP SAFE MODE. Looks like a great plugin otherwise!

Dave (5 comments) - November 22nd, 2005

How can I get it to use the en_CA dictionary? Putting “en” works, but I want the Canadian aspell dictionary to be used.

Charles M (1 comments) - November 24th, 2005

Hi. I think I incorrectly upgraded to 1.18. When I went to activate the plugin on the plug-in page, my whole site just shows bland. I have manually deleted all of the filed from the wp-content and plugin directory and I got my page back. But whenever I re-try to install the plugin and go to the WordPress plugin activation page, the whole is blank again.

Any thoughts on what I dorked up?

jjk (2 comments) - November 30th, 2005

For whatever reason, I cannot get the personal dictionary to appear writeable. I keep getting the error:

FATAL: You forgot to make the personal dictionary directory writable. Please read the install instructions and chmod this folder to provide write privileges to the Apache task.

However, I have pointed the spell checker to /var/www/html/wp-content/spell-plugin/aspell.personal , and I have changed that whole spell-plugin directory to 777 with no effect. The directory is owned by my local user and is in the group apache. What am I doing wrong?

WordPress version 1.5.1.3, Spelling Checker 1.18

badrad (1 comments) - December 2nd, 2005

I am with Dan, patiently waiting for a 2.0 update which I am sure will come.

Tom (6 comments) - December 8th, 2005

I get the same error as JJK when checking spelling. Thanks in advance for your help.

Tom (6 comments) - December 8th, 2005

Changed “en_US” to “en” in Options, and all is well. Thanks for the quick response!

JP (1 comments) - December 16th, 2005

Getting this error when trying to use the spell-checker (wp 1.5.2):

Error: the file “…/aspell-word-list.txt” is not in the proper format.

Hu?

MiCHA (1 comments) - December 21st, 2005

If you want to use spell checker with a language other than English, you may need to add “–encoding=utf=8″ to $aspell_opts in spellchecker.php. Otherwise some special non-latin chars may not be interpreted correctly.

anna. (4 comments) - December 25th, 2005

Brian, I get the by now much hated Internal Server Error. My error log says the following:

[Sun Dec 25 14:41:59 2005] [error] [client 85.141.146.147] Premature end of script headers: php-script, referer: http://www.teambio.org/wp-content/spell-plugin/spellchecker.html

I’m pretty sure I have aspell installed, it was one of my criteria for the webhost Yes, so I can finally use this plugin.

Ideas?

robert (11 comments) - December 26th, 2005

Okay -

I have aspell 0.60 installed - WP 2.0 RC3 installed I installed the spell-check plugin

When I first attempted to use the spellchecker I got an error that en_US.dat was not located.

Yep – that does not exist on the system.

Made the change in options-spellchecker from en_US to en. Saved the changes

Still get the same error. en_US.dat not available

Had to modify the file aspell.personal by hand to have en not en_US.

Now the spellchecker finds no errors, not even on a word “QFcnief”

Found note here about WYSIWYG editors. Turned that off – now it works.

Okay, so this would be a A+ plugin if it could check spelling with any editor.

Cheers

Asa Jay (1 comments) - January 2nd, 2006

Just installed this tool. Had to change en_US to just plain en to match the files on my server, no big deal, glad the options allowed me to do that.

Got the spell check button, used it, and worked my way through the errors. The ADD button was available and I tried using it. All was well until the speller finished and closed. All “added” words were -not- added (I got an error message) and the post did not get updated with the fixes. All else appeared to work well.

Tried again, dismissing all “add” words instead of trying to add them. Similar result. No error message on add words since I didn’t try to add any words, but the post still did not update with the changes.

I tihnk this might be a bug, when used with WordPress 2.0. For now, even if I have to fix the post manually, having the spell checker open and finding the errors, is a BIG plus in my book.

Here’s hoping you massage it a bit for 2.0

Thanks, Asa Jay

BetaCandy (3 comments) - January 6th, 2006

I hope this hasn’t been asked and answered (I’ve gone blind reading all the comments, LOL). This plugin works great for posts, but in comments, it keeps getting the filepath wrong with a double slash in the middle:

http://thehathorlegacy.info//wp-content/spell-plugin/spellchecker.html

Causes it to get a blank screen and do nothing. I’ve seen other people having the blank screen, and tried several of those solutions, but nothing’s working. What am I doing wrong?

BetaCandy (3 comments) - January 6th, 2006

I thought of that, but there is no slash there.

Antonia (1 comments) - January 9th, 2006

I see others have gotten this same error but, none of the solutions I came across seem to be working for me. I’m using 1.5.2 and I also had to install Aspell. I’m a newbie to all this stuff and I have no idea what to do. This is the error message:

System error: Aspell program execution failed (‘user/bin/aspell-a–lang=en_US–personal=/var/www/html/journal/wp-content/spell-plugin/aspell.personal &1′)

samurai (2 comments) - January 9th, 2006

Was wondering if anyone got this successfully installed on wpmu, so that newly created blogs do not have to re-configure the plugin. I’ve looked through the replies and cannot find any info on this. Any help would be greatly appreciated Thanks.

Thor (19 comments) - January 11th, 2006

So, Brian, what kind of bribe will it take to get you to move WordPress 2.0 compatibility up on your priority list?

Chris (15 comments) - January 13th, 2006

Yeah, what kind of a bribe$ will it take before you can make thi$ work in Wordpre$$ 2.0 with WY$IWYG enabled?

Chris (15 comments) - January 17th, 2006

Lee: You can probably fix that by changing “lang=en_US” to “lang=en” – not sure, but that worked for me.

Jim (8 comments) - January 21st, 2006

why bother creating a major plugin if you have no intention of continuing support? What a waste of my time. . .

Matthew Delmarter (1 comments) - February 4th, 2006

I have created a new AJAX Spell Checker. See a demo and download the plugin for WordPress 2.0 here: http://matthew.delmarters.com/weblog/visual_spellcheck/trackback/

KDE (1 comments) - May 28th, 2006

All you really need is a web browser, that can use aspell etc to do spelling checks in webpages “text box” while you type. Like Konqueror for example….