SEOMedic Simple Grammar Checker

Changelog

1.17.0

• Hyphenated and accented names are now recognised as proper names. Names like “Meilleur-Giguère”, “Müller”, or “O’Brien” now offer the “Keep as proper name” option, which previously only appeared for plain A–Z names.
• No more mis-clicks when working through results. Applying a fix, adding to the dictionary, keeping a proper name, or ignoring an error now marks that item done in place — the remaining items no longer jump up the list, so a quick next click always lands where you expect. A “Clear resolved” button compacts the list when you’re ready.

1.16.0

• All LanguageTool languages are now available. The language selector previously offered a fixed list of 15 languages, which artificially limited what the checker could do. It now fetches the full list from LanguageTool (62 languages at the time of writing, including Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Greek, and Persian) and the list stays current automatically as LanguageTool adds support for more.
• The saved language is validated by format rather than against a fixed list, so no supported language can be rejected. If the language list cannot be fetched, a built-in list is used as a temporary fallback and the selector keeps working.

1.15.1

• Plugin Check compliance: the bundled synonym dictionary is now shipped as a plain JSON file instead of a gzipped one (compressed files are not permitted in the plugin directory). No change to how synonym matching behaves.
• Plugin Check compliance: each AJAX handler now calls check_ajax_referer() directly instead of via a shared helper, so the nonce verification is visible to static analysis. The permission checks added in 1.15.0 are unchanged.

1.15.0

• Security: added capability checks to every AJAX endpoint. Previously these handlers verified a nonce but not the user’s permissions. A nonce only proves a request came from the plugin’s own page — it is not authorisation. As a result, any user who could open the plugin screen (anyone with edit_posts, e.g. Contributors and Authors) could change site-wide plugin data, and could read or overwrite posts belonging to other users.
• Site-wide plugin data — Settings, language, disabled error types, the custom dictionary, and the ignored-errors list — now requires the manage_options capability (administrators). The Custom Dictionary, Ignored Errors, and Settings tabs, and the “Add to Dictionary” / “Ignore” buttons, are now only shown to administrators.
• Scanning and fixing posts now requires edit_posts plus a per-post edit_post check, so users can only scan and fix the posts they are actually allowed to edit.
• The admin menu slug is now seomedic-simple-grammar (was the generic, unprefixed grammar-checker) to match the plugin slug and avoid collisions with other plugins. If you had bookmarked the old admin URL, update it.

1.14.0

• Synonym matching on Find Posts. With Broaden search on, you can now also match synonyms (English): searching “guide” also surfaces posts using “tutorial”, “handbook”, or “guidebook”. Powered by a small bundled WordNet dataset — no external calls, and only loaded when you use it. Results are approximate and ranked by relevance.

1.13.0

• Stylistic repetition is now its own toggle. “Repetitions (Style)” — reusing the same word nearby — is separated from “Word Repetitions” in Settings, so you can switch off the stylistic suggestions without disabling the whole Style category.
• Plain-English glossary in Settings. A new “What do these types mean?” panel explains each error type (Collocations, Compounding, Semantics, etc.) so it’s clear what you’re switching off.
• Broaden search on Find Posts. An optional toggle matches posts containing any word from your term, ranked by how many match — useful for finding a relevant post to link to when no post has the exact phrase.

1.12.0

• You can now check any language LanguageTool supports — choose it in Settings, or use Auto-detect. No longer limited to US English.
• Added Post type and Status selectors: scan posts, pages, or any public post type, in any status (including drafts), on both the Grammar Checker and Find Posts screens.
• WordPress.org compliance: admin CSS/JS are now properly enqueued (no inline blocks), all functions/hooks/options use a unique prefix, and the plugin was renamed to SEOMedic Simple Grammar Checker. Existing dictionary, ignored errors, and disabled types are migrated automatically.

1.11.2

• Refreshed the plugin listing: clearer focus on keeping older posts updated as a content-freshness signal, and on the per-post Post Score.

1.11.1

• Disabling an error type in Settings now also matches that category by its name, so disabled types (e.g. word repetitions) are reliably skipped on the next scan.
• Added a clear “External services” disclosure to the readme describing what is sent to the LanguageTool API.
• Scan progress now reads “Checking post ID …” for clarity.
• Hardened input sanitisation on the Settings save handler.

1.11.0

• Added a per-post quality score badge in the results header: a blended 0–100 “Post score” combining grammar (errors per word), readability (Flesch reading ease), and average sentence length, colour-coded Good / Fair / Needs work. Hover for the breakdown. English-only and approximate.

1.10.0

• Added a Settings tab where you can switch off whole categories of errors site-wide (e.g. word repetitions), so they’re never flagged in future scans.
• Per-post error counts now respect the active type filter: when you filter to a single type, each post shows the count for that type (e.g. “5 Capitalization errors”) instead of the total.

1.9.1

• Fixed error highlights drifting onto the wrong characters (appearing to span a space) on posts containing emoji or flag symbols — LanguageTool’s UTF-16 offsets are now converted to code points.
• Fixed the post-count limit being ignored: the Check Posts button and scan lock now stay active for the whole scan, so a second scan can’t start and append posts beyond the selected limit.

1.9.0

• Scan results now stream in collapsed and append in place, so the page no longer jumps and an open inline editor is never wiped while later posts are still loading.
• Added “Expand all” / “Collapse all” buttons above the results; each post can still be toggled individually, and the state is remembered when results re-render.

1.8.9

• Added a “Find Posts” tab to search published posts by word or phrase.
• Anchor text mode finds posts that link out using specific link text (with the destination URL shown) — useful for auditing internal links and anchor text.
• Search results link straight to the editor and the live post.

1.8.8

• Sentence-level inline edits now warn when the original sentence contains inline formatting (bold, links, etc.), since applying a plain-text rephrase would strip that markup.
• Each scanned post now has an “Edit post” link that opens it directly in the WordPress editor — handy for fixing formatting-heavy sentences by hand.

1.8.7

• Error context now shows the full sentence (with the error highlighted) instead of a short snippet, so multi-word problems are easier to judge.
• Inline editing now lets you rephrase the entire sentence in a text box, not just swap a single word — useful when a fix spans several words or sentence boundaries.

1.8.6

• Full names (e.g. “John Smith”), hyphenated and apostrophe names (e.g. “Jean-Luc”, “O’Brien”) now also offer “Keep as proper name”.
• Added inline editing: click “Edit…” on any error to type your own correction when the suggestions are not quite right.
• Added a “Filter by type” dropdown above the results so you can focus on one category at a time (e.g. just likely proper names).

1.8.5

• Fixed Add to Dictionary and Ignore buttons: they now reliably remove the word and clear every occurrence of it across the scanned posts (e.g. a product name used several times in one post), instead of only hiding the single clicked instance.

1.8.4

• Cleaner results display: errors now show a clear single-line sentence context (using LanguageTool’s own context) with the message, instead of a monospace snippet with stray blank lines.
• Repeated words (e.g. a name appearing several times on one page) are now labelled “Instance k of n” so you can tell occurrences apart and fix each individually.
• More reliable fixes for duplicates: applying a fix now keeps every other error’s position exact regardless of the order you apply them, so the correct occurrence is always replaced.

1.8.3

• Fixed missing nonce on check_single_post AJAX call — posts were silently failing with no results shown.

1.8.2

• Added Requires at least and Requires PHP headers so WordPress shows compatibility info on upload.

1.8.1

• Fixed all WordPress Plugin Check errors and warnings for WP.org submission: escaped output, added isset() guards and wp_unslash() on all $_POST reads, sanitised JSON input, added style version parameter.
• Bumped Tested up to: 7.0.

1.8

• Plugin renamed to Simple Grammar.
• Added Author URI and complete plugin header for WordPress.org submission.
• Added GPL-2.0+ licence header.

1.7

• Fixed offset/HTML mismatch: errors now map back to exact byte positions in post_content, so fixes on posts containing tables, blockquotes, or formatted markup land in the correct place.
• Fixed multibyte drift: highlights and context snippets are now correct after curly quotes, ellipses, and other non-ASCII characters.
• Removed 1000-word cap: long posts are split into chunks and fully checked.
• Added working one-click Apply button for each suggestion (was a non-functional stub).
• New ajax_apply_fix endpoint with a nearest-occurrence fallback so multiple fixes can be applied to one post without re-scanning.
• Fixed a pre-existing fatal parse error in the quote-normalisation code that prevented the plugin from loading on strict PHP environments.

1.6

• Added inline error context display with highlighted error spans.
• Custom dictionary matching improved with Unicode normalisation.
• Ignored errors list introduced.

1.1

• Initial public release.