Matt Mullenweg has just annouced on his blog that WordPress parent company Automattic is open sourcing After the Deadline, a natural-language spell-checking plugin for WordPress and TinyMCE that was only recently ushered into the Automattic fold.
Scarcely seven weeks after its acquisition was announced, After the Deadline’s core technology is being released under the GPL. Moreover, writes Mullenweg, “There’s also a new jQuery API that makes it easy to integrate with any text area.”
AtD founder, former military researcher, and Y-Combinator reject Rafael Mudge noted at the acquisition that he intended to continue his natural language processing research and expand support to other languages. He wrote, “We hope to see others build on the service… We’re planning to open source the After the Deadline engine and the rule-sets that go with it. This will be the most comprehensive proofreading suite available under an open source license.”
The related API is the same one that powers a plugin from another Automattic property, Intense Debate. Mudge told Ostatic, “I’d like to see AtD spread as far and wide as possible. I’m an inventor first and have this desire to see my inventions help people.”
Interested parties can check out this demo or read the tech overview and grab the source code here.
