Easy Spell Checking On Drupal With Firefox

When I create thought out content like a blog entry I like to be neat. I like to check there are no typos etc. I also like to create my posts in a WYSIWYG editor too, it's just easier. I found that doing this in Drupal is not quite as easy as it should be; it requires additional modules. Last night I stumbled on an easy way.

There used to be standalone editors like TinyMCE, now Drupal has the WYSIWYG module which acts as a focus point for whatever editors you want to use. It's a bit more awkward to set up but it gives more flexibility. Even though many of these editors have a spell checking button, they need additional modules installed to actually do anything.

I use the FCKeditor module. Apart from having all the functions I need when creating or editing a post, it also has a button to quickly switch back and forth between rich text and source mode. I always switch to source mode to clean up extra unwanted tags that somehow worked their way in, but now I've stumbled across another very useful feature of source mode. In Firefox it picks up typos, like any regular text box, underlining them and giving suggestions on the right click menu. Before I used to create my posts in Bluefish, spell check them, then paste in source mode.

Since it's Firefox doing the spell checking, I have to assume the same trick would work in every CMS. I'd also imagine that other browsers like Opera could be made to offer spell checking, if they don't by default. I think that because I'd already spell checked it before I pasted it, that I never noticed this until last night.