Tabs are an excellent way for presenting data on a page or post, but you may be wondering how to achieve this with WordPress. By default WordPress does not provide an easy way to handle tabbed content, but a number of plugins make this a piece of cake.
Let’s take a look at the two best plugins for creating tabbed content in WordPress:
WordPress Tabs Slides
WordPress Tabs Slides is probably the most complete plugin in this area, giving you the opportunity to create tabs, slides and even accordions within your post or page content.
Here is a preview of the kind of effect you can create with the WordPress Tabs Slides plugin:
To create tabs with this client you can insert the following shortcodes into your post or page:
{tab=Tab 1}
Contents Tab 1
{tab=Tab 2}
Contents Tab 2
{/tabs}
As the name of the plugin implies, you can also create Slides:
{slide=Slide Title} Contents {/slide}
A newer features is the ability to create accordions. The difference between accordions and slides is that when you open one accordion the rest will be closed, while in the case of slides you can open one or more at once if you wish. To create an accordion in your WordPress posts and pages using this plugin, insert the following code, preferebly in the HTML editor:
{accordion=Accordion 1} Contents {/accordion}
{accordion=Accordion 2} Contents {/accordion}
postTabs
postTabs is a similar plugin, however limited to the creation of tabs. This plugin also has quite a number of options that help you customise the look of your tabs, so it might be a better option if you want a quick solution that lets you change colours from its admin panel. postTabs also has an interesting option which, when enabled, remembers the last opened tab. This requires cookies to operate. The shortcodes required to create tabs are similar to the WordPress Tabs Slides plugin:
[tab:Tab 1] Contents Tab 1 [tab:Tab 2] Contents Tab 2 [tab:END]
Have you tried Tabber?
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/tabber-widget/
http://ithemes.com/2010/01/12/ithemes-tabber-widget/
Haven’t tried that one, thanks for the suggestion!
really useful tutorial. thanks brother for the share with us
Welcome mate.
Can this plugin be called in any part of a wordpress website by including the code to that part of the page?
we would like to include it in the home page of our wordpress theme.
thanks,
John
Yes as long as it is in the Edit post editor, not directly in the theme code.
We need it in the theme code. We are not using a custom page for the home page so we need to edit the theme code directly.
Maybe you know of any plugin which can do this?
thanks a lot
You can work around that. Create a page and put the tabbed content within that page, then in the template make a loop that calls that page specifically, you can call it by ID for example.
Thanks for this Jean, I always prefer reading someone’s breakdown of plugins over sorting through the 3 pages of “plugins tagged with ‘tab’”.
Hi there, does using these tabs plugins affect seo – is there any plugin that is good for tabs and seo ?
They shouldn’t affect SEO negatively as the content will still be visible to spiders.
I have just uploaded my ‘jQuery UI Widgets’ Plugin to the WordPress repository, if you are interested. It allows you to easily insert simple HTML markup to create tabs, accordions, dialogs etc.
You can use any of the built-in jQuery themes or define your own using the official jQuery ThemeRoller. This is great for blending in the tabs with your WordPress theme.
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/jquery-ui-widgets/
Thanks for letting us know David, nice work!
Thanks for this! The “PostTabs” plugin is exactly what I was looking for.
Looks good, interested in the slide part! We’ve been using GT Tabs which is super simple and works great, but doesn’t do slides!