I wanted to share my experiences with Mandeep's Live Tabs--partly as a review and I couldn't fit all this information in the Snowcovered review section and partly to see if others have had similar experiences or thoughts.

As of this writing, this is the best AJAX tabs module on the market. It features an intuitive interface and is easy to use. The design elements are also the best on the market today. Like me, if you also have need of an accordion module, you can purchase both Live Tabs and Live Accordion and they both come with the same matching interface templates and this makes for a nice added benefit. You can also place modules into tabs and still access the module dropdown menus. Some competing solutions don’t do this and as a result you have to put the modules on a separate hidden page and this makes content management all the more time-consuming.

The vendor provides excellent customer service and works hard to help resolve issues. I had a couple of problems with it and they helped me resolve them in a timely manner, including logging into my server and looking for problems in the html code my client had entered into tabs (you can’t get away with much non-compliant code in this module without causing minor display issues but hey, I suppose that just helps you write clean code and with the increasingly sensitive new html and xml standards, that seems inevitable anyway). This puts the vendor in a top class in terms of customer support.

I would like to have given this module a 5-star rating but couldn’t because of some technical issues about how it’s designed that have negatively impacted me. I will say that for many users these issues won’t be a problem at all and if after reading them you don’t find them problematic of your applications, I would recommend this module to you without reservation.

This module (as well as the Live Accordion module) doesn’t place its data in normalized tables and fields. Instead, it has one table containing a primary key and an ntext field into which all the information related to each instance of the module is stored as XML. Most of my instances of this tab module require around 24K worth of data. Naturally, this architecture has some implications that could be negative for some users.

First, I found this module to display its data correctly on the page slower than others (the content will display on the page for a moment without the tab structure while the page completes loading). I was using Active Tabs on all my sites until the vendor pulled it off the market. So, I purchased Live Tabs as a replacement. I dropped Live Tabs on all of the same pages as Active Tabs and loaded the same modules and data side-by-side. Live Tabs loaded much slower than Active Tabs did using exactly the same data—enough so that others who saw the performance comparison commented that Live Tabs loaded dramatically slower.

For some of my heaviest content pages it can take upwards of 30 seconds for it to display correctly in the current version of Firefox (which is by far the slowest browser for loading this tab data, other browsers display the same data much faster). When I reported this performance issue to the developer, he ran some tests on my page loads and suggested my server wasn’t fast enough to handle the workload. But, it runs DNN just fine as well as all my other 100 or so modules. I am running them on a dedicated Intel LGA775 dual core, 6GB DDR3, 250GB SATA/6 RAID 0, Windows 2008 Server 64-bit, SQL Server 2008 Standard Edition 64-bit, IIS7.0, DotNet 3.5 SP1, in Dallas’ premiere colo typically measuring 36MBps download across my pipes). If the developer is right, you may just need to make sure your server is more robust than mine. I’ve done a lot of performance optimization but I think I still have some room for improvement.

Second, if you tend to write adhoc queries to manipulate data, or if you need to do special integration between data, or generate Microsoft Reporting Services, or if you need to write triggers for your tables, or if you need to use SQL Server Integration Services to get data into or out of your database, you may be limited in your abilities to do so based on this data storage strategy.

I’ve had extended dialogue with the developer over these issues and he doesn’t believe them to be issues at all. He seems satisfied with the architecture behind these modules and doesn’t seem convinced that they cause any problems. So, I will let him speak for himself and share his side of the story and you can decide for yourself.

Overall, I suggest you at least download the 14-day trial and experience it for yourself. Despite the drawbacks the technical design has on my business, I still don’t think there is a better solution on the market. Just know what you are getting into when purchasing this module so you can plan accordingly.

I would have been willing to give this module a 4.5 star rating but since half stars aren’t available, I couldn’t give it a 5-star rating in good conscience. But, I hope my 4-star rating doesn’t cause you to not give it the serious consideration it deserves.