Tab navigation in template for Drupal

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Tab navigation in template for Drupal

Using tab navigation for content is a great way to keep your site less cluttered and organised if you have a lot of contents.

As long as the contents are group well with the tabs it can bring about a more usable site. For example i have a few RSS feeds in the sidebar, this is really just taking up unnecessary space on the page and it would be logical just to group them and use a tab navigation. Another point is that these RSS feeds are less important than all the other contents on this site so even if it isn't revealed to site visitors until they click on a tab, it really isn't a big problem. For those that don't know what tab navigation is, here are some examples.

Tabs can be created using 2 different Drupal modules (there probably exist more but these are the only ones i know of so far). One of them is the jsTools module and the other one is the Tabbed block module.

jsTools module requires a bit more work to setup but does have some neat effects (slider and fade) you can apply to the tabs, and is more flexible in terms of what can be grouped into the tabs. Just to note, jsTools is not just for tabs, it provides a common set of methods for AJAX and Javascript development and comes default with other js scripts ready to be integrated.

Tabbed block module on the other hand was created for easy and simple use. Once installed as a module you are set to go. It has a settings page where you can define which blocks should be grouped to create another block with tabs. I really liked it because it was lightning fast to create tab navigation. The only downside was that there is no effects to add to the tabs and it only works for blocks. Whereas jsTools can put contents from Views making it highly flexible.

I'll will have a couple of tabs up on this site very soon. Sorry, should really have them up before posting this blog but i got excited after playing around with it on my test site :)

UPDATE (14th March 2008):

Another cool tab module being added is the Quick Tabs module. It allows you to create blocks of tabbed content, specifically views and blocks. This site uses Quick Tabs.