jQuery UI includes a tabs widget that makes it easy to add tab panels to your web applications.  Out-of-the-box, it currently only supports horizontal tab strips across the top of the content, like so:

normalTabs

There are samples in the jQuery UI code that show how you can easily achieve either side (vertical) tabs or bottom (horizontal) layouts with some simple jQuery and CSS, but I didn’t want to have to copy-and-paste the code every time I needed non-standard tab layouts.  I’ve packaged the styles and script up into the superTabs library which introduces two new jQuery plug-in methods:

$("#verticalTabs").verticalTabs();

$("#bottomTabs").bottomTabs();

These take the standard jQuery UI tabs options.  Here’s the tabs widget with vertical tabs:

verticalTabs

And here are bottom tabs:

bottomTabs

You can see a demo in action or download the code.  Enjoy!