I have been trying to gt this right for months. Ok, granted, I am not an expert web programmer but I am a programmer so I was dead set on solving this. It was like there was some secret brotherhood trick, I was thinking like Battlefield Earth kind of thing. You know where the aliens hid the real technology behind a facade of dummy circuitry. I searched an search and found a lot of sites saying stuff about it but not actually implementing it, and those that did must have been doing that Battlefield Earth facade thing. Well I use it (as of March 2010) and I aint gonna hide how I got it to work – here is what I did (feel free to slate me if it does not work for you):
This got a bit long so I put this in two parts; Part one, this post is kind of the back story and how I got to what I wanted, and part two will be the how to (what to download, php, css, etc)

The Beginning
I really liked the way tabs was implemented on the 8Bit Network (ChurchCrunch ChurchCreate ChurchDrop, ChurchIT and ChurchLoop) and much of my digging around started with looking how it was implemented there. I used FireBug quite a lot but even though I learned much; I could not figure it out – must have been because wooTabs was used and I think that’s a component of a paid theme (don’t quote me on that, I could be wrong). And of did I Google the phrases half to death to find good examples I could learn from.

First Steps
The first sign of progress was when I stumbled upon idTabs. It was fantastic. It was just what I needed and the examples were independent of any theme. http://www.sunsean.com/idTabs/ is a plugin for jQuery that is supported in wordpress 2.9.2. All that I needed to do was download the js file, follow the instructions and all would be set. Right? Wrong. Nothing is ever that easy.

Objective
I wanted to use the tabbed widget because it would allow we to offer more information in less vertical real estate in the sidebar. In fact it could be used anywhere to save space; post footer, blog footer, even expandable menu links in the navigation bar. I wanted to display the popular posts, categories and maybe in future – archives.

What is to Follow
Obviously I got it working. Ok, I am a nut – it took me a few months – a few hours a week around midnight to finally figure it out. Which will be shared next week

Moving on
I really need to improve both my Post footer and blog footer, so I think I will start taking a look at how I can further implement the tabs in those areas – maybe when you read this it will have already been done; if not – flame me The nice thing about the tabs and the css uses to style it is that I keep the look the same with minor adjustments in the different regions.