Using the review panel

RedPen’s day-to-day surface is a panel in the sidebar of the entry edit screen. It is where writers see what the style guide has to say about what they just wrote.

When it checks

With checkOnLoad on — the default — the panel checks the entry as the edit screen opens. There is also a Check now button, which re-reads the current state of the fields, so you can re-run after an edit without saving.

Results are cached for cacheDuration seconds (300 by default) keyed on the content itself, so re-opening an entry nobody has touched does not repeat the work. Set it to 0 to disable caching entirely.

Severities

Severity is set per rule, per profile, so the same rule can be an error in your newsroom section and a notice everywhere else.

Click a finding, see the words

Every finding carries an offset back into the original field value, so clicking it scrolls to and highlights the exact text that caused it. This works in plain text fields, inside CKEditor and Redactor, in Table cells, and inside nested Matrix blocks — a finding in myMatrix.2.bodyText resolves to the right block and the right field within it.

Getting that right is most of the machinery: rich text is flattened to prose for checking, and an offset map translates each finding’s position in the prose back to a position in the source HTML. Rules that need to inspect the markup itself — spacing, for instance — run against the source directly instead.

The health score

Each check produces a score out of 100. Penalties scale with word count, not field count: roughly fifteen points per hundred words at the top severity. An entry with three fields and forty words is not held to the same absolute standard as a two-thousand-word feature, which is what makes the number comparable across a site.

Dismissing a finding

Some findings are wrong for a given piece of content, and re-reading them every time is what kills adoption. Dismiss a finding and it stays dismissed, with an undo available immediately afterwards.

Dismissals are keyed to the element, the rule and a hash of the offending text — not its position. That has two useful consequences:

• Editing the paragraph around a dismissed phrase does not resurrect the finding.
• Deleting the phrase and later putting it back does bring the finding back, because it is a new occurrence of something you never actually approved in that place.

Suggestions

Rules that know a replacement offer one — utilize becomes use, Github becomes GitHub. Suggestions from the AI backend arrive as a diff with per-item accept and reject.

RedPen never applies a suggestion on its own, in any edition, from any backend. An editorial tool that silently rewrites copy is a liability, and the point of the plugin is that a person decides.