Installing the TinyMCE spellchecker in SugarCRM

I had to go through the exercise of installing and configuring the TinyMCE spellchecker in a SugarCRM 5.0 installation today, so I'm blogging it here for future reference and google karma.

Here's my exact scenario:

- OS: CentOS 4.4 32-bit
- SugarCRM version: SugarCE-Full-5.0.0a (under /var/www/html/SugarCRM)

I first downloaded the TinyMCE spellchecker plugin v. 1.0.5 by following the link from the TinyMCE download page.

I unzipped tinymce_spellchecker_php_1_0_5.zip and copied the resulting spellchecker directory under my SugarCRM installation (in my case under /var/www/html/SugarCRM/include/javascript/tiny_mce/plugins).

I edited spellchecker/config.php and specified:

require_once("classes/TinyPspellShell.class.php"); // Command line pspell
$spellCheckerConfig['enabled'] = true;

The command-line pspell uses the binary /usr/bin/aspell, which in my case was already installed, but YMMV. If you want the embedded PHP spellchecker, you need to recompile PHP with the pspell module.

The main configuration of the layout of TinyMCE happens in /var/www/html/SugarCRM/include/SugarTinyMCE.php. I chose to add the spellchecker button in the line containing the definition of buttonConfig3:

var $buttonConfig3 = "tablecontrols,spellchecker,separator,advhr,hr,removeformat,separator,insertdate,inserttime,separator,preview";

I also added the spellchecker plugin in the same file, in the line containing the plugins definitions inside the defaultConfig definition:

'plugins' => 'advhr,insertdatetime,table,preview,paste,searchreplace,directionality,spellchecker',

I restarted Apache, just to make sure all the include files are re-read (not sure if it was necessary, but better safe than sorry), and lo and behold, the spellcheck button was there when I went to the Compose Email form. After entering some misspelled text, I clicked the spellcheck button. I was then able to right click the misspelled words and was offered a list of words to choose from.

If it sounds painless, rest assured, it wasn't. The documentation helped a bit, but it was sufficiently different from what I was seeing that I had to do some serious forensics-type searches within the SugarCRM file hierarchy. But all is well that ends well.