I spent a great deal of time recently looking for a Tabs module to fill a specific need. I thought I would share what I found with the community.
Here are the tabs modules I looked at:
Aggregator
Live Tabs - Formerly
CSS Tabs
DNN360 Tabs - Formerly
Yahoo-Liked Tabs
AjaxTabs From Gumbosoft - No longer available
DigRotate
TabsPro
Jquery Content
IWrapper
J-Tab
Silversoft Tabzone
Two other solutions would include:
Build your own tabs using jquery UI Tabs
Telerik Tabstrip control included with DNN
Several of the above modules are based almost entirely around jquery ui tabs. A couple of them were around before jquery and have added jquery abilities and skins on top of what they already did. And there are one or two of the modules that don't utilize jquery at all.
The feature I was looking for, and the reason for all this work, was load-on-demand tabs via ajax instead of a page postback. Only AjaxTabs would do that and it is no longer available.
The top two modules would be Aggregator and Live Tabs. This is mainly because these two have module wrapping abilities and load-on-demand abilities while the rest do not.
Aggregator
Advantages:
Aggregator offers the most features. It does everything Live Tabs does plus it has IMC so you can have one main tabs module on a page and several child tabs modules - clicking on a tab of the main tabs module will also change all of the child tabs modules. You can easily use jquery ThemeRoller to create your own skins for the tab module. It comes with slider and accordion abilities as well as tabs. You can nest tabs inside of tabs - including left and right side tabs. You can use module containers inside a tab. It can consume RSS feeds. No activation. Lower cost.
Disadvantages:
Load-on-demand won't work with jquery skins - only with Aggregator skins. Load-on-demand is post-back instead of ajax.
Live Tabs
Advantages:
Has module wrapping abilities, load-on-demand (post-back style), auto-rotating tabs, all of the jquery abilities such fading and sliding effects when tabs are clicked, etc.
Disadvantages:
You have to add Live Tabs syntax to ThemeRoller skins before using them. Can't nest right/left sided tabs. Module containers won't work inside of tabs. Accordion and slider abilities are separate extra cost modules. No RSS abilities. Module has activation. Load-on-demand is post-back instead of ajax.
AjaxTabs
Ajaxtabs was a very nice module in that it had ajax load-on-demand abilities as well as many settings to refine how the ajax worked - this allowed the end user to help solve ajax conflicts with modules. It was missing module wrapping abilities and jquery skins/abilities.
Runners-up would be DNN360 Tabs (RSS abilities, slider, and accordion abilities) and DigRotate.
Hopefully one of these modules will solve the load-on-demand post-back issue and offer this ability via ajax.
I would also like to see someone develop a tabs module using the Telerik Tabstrip control. The Telerik control has a couple of abilities that the others do not. Namely - Scrolling Tabs, Multi-Row Tabs, and Hierarchical Tabs.
Hope this helps.