I was hoping for some advice on the best way to go about using tabs within WordPress.
I have 4 categories which I'd like to separate using tabs, but if I use tabs I'm afraid that it will slow the page load down as all 4 loops would have to load in their respective posts within each tab. The first tab is 'All' and then the following 3 are categories, but essentially each post would be loaded once by the 'All' loop and then again in each category before the page fully loads. Would it be a better idea to use 1 loop along with an if statement which has a variable that is changed onclick by each tab, when each tab is pressed it changes the variable which changes the category within 'query_posts' and reruns the loop. The first option would be easier to set up but I'm worried about load time once the number of posts gets high.
Anyone got any suggestions/advice? Or just their 2 cents. To give you an idea of what I'm trying to achieve please check out the Fantasy Interactive site here: http://www.f-i.com/work If you click on 'Sort our work' on the top of the middle column then you get the gist of it.
So after a little research I realized that I can't rerun the loop with a JS variable without refreshing the page, so that option is out. Would using AJAX to bypass a page refresh and save on initial page load work in this situation?
@noahgelman, I didn't think it was possible to pass a javascript variable to a variable within a php loop and then rerun it using that variable without refreshing the page, as the PHP is parsed server side and javascript parsed client side. Am I wrong on that? I am not too experienced with PHP beyond what I use with WordPress.
@clokey2k, thanks for that link, looks like a great solution, I'm going to try that out using the tag names within each post's post_class to categorize them.
I have 4 categories which I'd like to separate using tabs, but if I use tabs I'm afraid that it will slow the page load down as all 4 loops would have to load in their respective posts within each tab. The first tab is 'All' and then the following 3 are categories, but essentially each post would be loaded once by the 'All' loop and then again in each category before the page fully loads.
Would it be a better idea to use 1 loop along with an if statement which has a variable that is changed onclick by each tab, when each tab is pressed it changes the variable which changes the category within 'query_posts' and reruns the loop. The first option would be easier to set up but I'm worried about load time once the number of posts gets high.
Anyone got any suggestions/advice? Or just their 2 cents. To give you an idea of what I'm trying to achieve please check out the Fantasy Interactive site here: http://www.f-i.com/work If you click on 'Sort our work' on the top of the middle column then you get the gist of it.
Many thanks in advance.
Load all of the posts in one loop, then filter based on category?
@noahgelman, I didn't think it was possible to pass a javascript variable to a variable within a php loop and then rerun it using that variable without refreshing the page, as the PHP is parsed server side and javascript parsed client side. Am I wrong on that? I am not too experienced with PHP beyond what I use with WordPress.
@clokey2k, thanks for that link, looks like a great solution, I'm going to try that out using the tag names within each post's post_class to categorize them.
Thanks again for the replies!