Sunday, September 2, 2012

Quick & Dirty Tabs on Drupal nodes

I just want a dead simple tab on a Drupal node but sometimes Drupal (with the internet) will just bend you over and spank you.

If you are reading this, I bet you found Quicktabs and read katbailey's "Go forth and tabbify" post but you came to the conclusion that its either:
  1. To complicated; You suspect that the hook_page_alter() function is gonna bite you in the ass down the line 
  2. Its not what you need 
I'll also bet you tried a few other approaches like leveraging the jQueryUI tabs like what Matt did and still found that it wasn't what you want. So now what? Well, you can do what I did - the quick and dirty tabs. 

My quick and dirty tabs is just javascript, html markup and a Omega subtheme. And it just involves 4 steps.

1. The HTML markup. You will use this inside your node.tpl.php or equivalent node template override. Notice the page-control and page-sections parts of the markup.
<div class="com-profile">  
      <div class="page-control">  
           <ul class="myQDtabs">  
                <li class="active"><a href="#">Basic Information</a></li>  
                <li><a href="#">Photos</a></li>  
                <li><a href="#">Forum</a></li>  
                <li><a href="#">Contact Persons</a></li>  
           </ul>  
      </div>  
      <div class="page-sections" style="display:none" >  
           <div class="section">  
                <div class="info">  
                     ...  
                </div>  
           </div>  
           <div class="section" style="display:none" >  
                <div class="gallery">  
                     ...  
                </div>  
           </div>  
           <div class="section" style="display:none" >  
                <div class="forum">  
                     ...  
                </div>  
           </div>  
           <div class="section" style="display:none" >  
                <div class="contactperson">  
                     ....  
                </div>  
           </div>  
      </div>  
 </div>  

2. The Stylesheet. I settled on a pill type of tabs. Just add these styles on the main subtheme stylesheet.
3. The Javascript. This is a tricky bit. If you have read Matt's post about Drupal and jQueryUI tabs, you'll know that Drupal allows other javascript frameworks so Drupal uses jQuery's .noConflict() function. This forces you to write your jQuery withouth that the '$' alias. Oh, create this script somewhere inside your subtheme.
jQuery(document).ready(function(){
    QDtabs('.myQDtabs','.page-sections','click');
});

//function-type tab switching
QDtabs = function($tabs,$tabcontent,method){
  jQuery($tabcontent + ' .section').eq(0).fadeIn();
  jQuery($tabs + ' li').eq(0).addClass('active');
 
  jQuery($tabs + ' li:not(.active)').die().live(method,function(e){
  e.stopPropagation();
  
  var $self = jQuery(this);
  var index = $self.index();  
  $self.addClass('active').siblings('.active').removeClass();  
  jQuery($tabcontent + ' .section').hide().eq(index).stop(false,true).fadeIn();
  
  return false;
 })
}

4. And the last step is making my Omega subtheme load the custom script. Omega has a particular way of adding custom javascripts.

libraries[my_script][name] = QD custom script
libraries[my_script][description] = Quick and dirty tabs
libraries[my_script][js][0][file] = my_scripts.js
libraries[my_script][js][0][options][weight] = 15

The last thing to do is a bit of housekeeping - Clear your Drupal cache and turning on my_script inside my theme's admin interface.


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