IMPORTANT NOTE FOR WORDPRESS 2.0 USERS
This plugin doesn’t play well in WordPress 2.0. I’m well aware of this. Some day I may update it but it is nowhere near the top of my priority list. Support questions for 2.0 installations will not make it out of moderation.
Latest version is 1.18, released 06/23/05.
I’ve been looking for a spelling checker plug-in for WordPress for a while. Didn’t find anything to my liking, so I figured I’d create one myself. The fruits of those labors are now here!
The Spelling Checker plugin for WordPress
With this plugin a new button appears alongside the rest to pop-up a spelling checker derived from the Speller Pages SourceForge project. No more typos!
This is a 1.18 release and it has been tested on WordPress 1.5.1.2. Please direct any questions or problems to me in this post.
ColdForged Says:November 18th, 2005 at 10:57 am
That depends on your hosting environment. From the error you list apparently it is not the right path otherwise the plugin would be working (or, at least providing a different error).
If you have shell access, you can try to find the path to
aspellthat way. I don’t hold out much hope because that’s what the plugin tries to do itself. You could ask your hosting provider what theaspellpath is. It’s possible — since you seem to imply that it used to work months ago — that your hosting provider removed it. In that case you’re likely out of luck.
Richard Silverstein Says:November 18th, 2005 at 3:46 am
Brian: I seem to have had a hard time of it getting Spell Check to work for me (it hasn’t worked for months).
I have the language set to ‘en,’ the files are CHMODed to 777, & I’ve deleted the previous installation of the plugin & tried reinstalling. But I’m still getting this error:
“sh: line 1:/usr/bin/aspell: no such file or directory.”
Under “Name and path to aspell executable,” is the setting supposed to be:
‘/usr/bin/aspell’ ?
I can’t think of what else could be wrong?
I did the one-click install.
Laundro Says:November 17th, 2005 at 10:34 am
Bingo!
Thanks so much! This has been racking my brain for weeks now…
ColdForged Says:November 17th, 2005 at 10:11 am
Please see this comment.
Laundro Says:November 17th, 2005 at 10:08 am
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!
Kevin Jarrett Says:November 16th, 2005 at 10:29 am
Thanks for clarifying. Looks like I’m SOL, my web host says they won’t install the executable, claiming it takes up too many resources. I’m going to try to rustle up support for it on the user forums. They run aspell on their dedicated servers, just not the low-end shared accounts (like I have). -kj-
ColdForged Says:November 16th, 2005 at 10:03 am
Bear in mind that what we’re referring to here isn’t a plugin but the actual aspell Unix executable on a Unix host. Just so we’re on the same page. It would be best if your host installed the aspell package but there may be a way for you to install it in your hosting directory itself. Here’s the manual for it.
It should be okay but I have no great way to test it aside from here live on this site in the comments, but I don’t know how many people utilize the spell checker nor do I often have multiple comments posted at one time. The plugin is coded to use a random named temporary file for each spell check which is the only concern for reentrancy in these cases (Apache handles keeping everything else about the connection straight).
To summarize, I think if you can sort out the aspell installation it should work for your requirements.
Kevin Jarrett Says:November 16th, 2005 at 6:42 am
Coldforged, two questions.
My web host doesn’t appear to have the aspell plugin installed. Is that something I can do or must they?
Also, how does your plugin handle multiple simultaneous logins? We blog at my school and teachers want the kids to have spell checking capability. Each blog has about 30 users and many would be writing posts and checking spelling at the same time.
Thanks in advance,
-kj-
Very Mom Says:November 14th, 2005 at 2:01 pm
Thank you, changing it to just “english” worked.
TJ Says:November 13th, 2005 at 9:38 pm
I found a few more issues, and solved them.
On a Windows server, the paths in the temporary and dictionary text-boxes have escaped back-slashes which, every time you update the settings, double up once more, so it goes 2,4,6,8, etc! I changed them to forward-slashes to solve that (D:/Server/ instead of D:\Server).
I installed the Windows MinGW port of Aspell from http://aspell.net/win32/ and specified it in the path-to-executable (D:/Server/Aspell/bin/aspell.exe). DONT FORGET to also install a language dictionary. That means at least two downloads - the Full Installer and (for example) aspell-en-0.50-2-3.exe. Make Sure the language setting on the configuration page matches. For English I set minet to en or en_GB - it depends on the language files you install.
The permissions need adjusting so the MACHINE\NETWORK_SERVICE has “Full Control” permissions on the “aspell.personal” file in the plugins/spell-plugin/ folder.
The javascript link embedded in web pages has an incorrect path - it is hard-coded on line 564 of spell-plugin.php as “/wp-content/spell-plugin/spellChecker.js” - its missing the “plugins/” folder, so add that in.
Now the spell window will try to load, but fails because “plugins/” is missing from several paths in spellChecker.js, so fix those (do a search/replace).
Configure a System environmental variable. Right-click My Computer, choose Properties, Advanced, Environment Variables, System variables, New and add ASPELL_CONF with the value “prefix D:\Server\Aspell” (including the quote-marks) - this is where you installed aspell to.