Automatically created tag tabs which show relevant posts

Here is what I want to do. 🙂

In single posts have tabs in the sidebar which:

1. automatically create tabs with the names of the tags based on the tags for the current post as labels.
2. In each tab window show the posts titles for the tag.
3. Create a table of contents similar to the AZIndex plugin automatically in each tab.
4. Only show posts for the categories that I want to show. This to seperate tags which run across multiple categories but are not related.
5. Tabs switch on hover.
6. W3C and Accessibility standards, javascript degrade gracefully. (I don’t think a pure css solution will be possible, but it might.)
7. Keep size and load to a mininum and keep it loading quick.

The reason I ran into this is that I started using related articles based on tags, which is simply awesome. Except as you can see in the following examples it looks great, I think, when you have a few posts, but when the post count runs higher it would be better, in my opinion, to orden the posts. One solution would be to show the tags and give visitors the ability to click on these, but then a new page has to be openened.

Example 1 a few related posts:
http://www.coolgrafimedia.com/chronisch-zieken-en-gehandicapten/beleid/moeten-chronisch-zieken-en-gehandicapten-kunnen-blijven-studeren-als-zij-een-uitkering-ontvangen.html

Example 2 many related posts:
http://www.coolgrafimedia.com/milieu/flow-plan-for-less-talk-and-more-action-as-climate-change-hits-rivers.html

With example 2 I added an search function, but have been unable to duplicate this for other categories.

Technically it should be possible to create the tabs automatically. I haven’t been able to find anything which does, yet. (The word “tags” is not the world’s easiest thing to search for. 😉 ) However, I did find that it is possible to create dynamic tabs with javascript:
http://dev.medryx.org/lib/js/dojo-extensions/dojox/widget/tests/test_DynamicStackContainer.html

So it would be a matter of writing the php and giving it css.

The exact specifications could differ for different websites (sections) For me the important part would be the automatically generation of tabs.

So far I have the following, which is still buggy, because I haven’t been able to get it to respect the list only posts from the current related children categies and relevant tags. There have been different versions, but once the “cat=>” is sorted this will dynamically show related posts for the tags in the current post within the categories selected (in this case they are all children categories of parents with no relation, hence the “cat_name” for current category). Leave out the “cat=>” and preliminary testing shows that it will show related posts. Further testing is needed though.

<ul>
 <?php
   global $post;
   foreach(get_the_tags($post->ID) as $tag) {
      $show_tags .= $tag->name . ',';
$rel_art .= rtrim($show_tags , ',');
}
 $args = array(
	'numberposts' => -1,
	'tag'=> $rel_art,
      'cat'=> cat_name,
       'exclude'=> $post->ID,
       'orderby'=> title,
        'order'=> ASC,
	);
 $myposts = get_posts($args) ;
 foreach($myposts as $post) :

 ?>
    <li class="your_class_here"><a href="<?php the_permalink(); ?>"><?php the_title(); ?></a></li>
 <?php endforeach; ?>
 </ul>

Well that’s the theory, anyway. One thing that would have to be seen is would this still be practical if there are 3000 or 25,000 related posts.

I will be working on this the next couple of weeks other people are welcome to join in. 🙂