SharePoint tabs UI for web parts

Christophe Humbert's beautiful Easy Tabs for SharePoint works wonderfully well; it automatically generates tabs for the web parts on the page. You simply drop the code Christophe provides into a content editor web part (CEWP) and off you go.

In a current project, we needed the ability to have all pages show tabs without dropping a CEWP on every page. The code needed to be on a page layout for a publishing site. The challenge? Christophe's code traverses up the DOM from the current CEWP to find the parent container of the web parts; unless you use a CEWP, it won't work.

Some serious trial-and-error, as well as posting to the SharePoint group on StackExchange.com, provided the clues; we need to provide a direct reference to the parent container of the web parts. Here's the part of the code that was moving up the DOM tree:

var el=document.getElementsByTagName("SCRIPT"),p=el[el.length-1],sT,a,sep,tabRow;
do {p=p.parentNode;sT=p.innerHTML.split("MSOZoneCell_WebPart");}while (sT.length<4 && p.parentNode.id!="MSO_ContentTable")

In the page layout, the web parts are in a Page Content control (PublishingWebControls:richhtmlfield), so here's the change to the JavaScript to reference that parent container:

var p,a,sep,tabRow;
p = document.getElementById('ctl00_PlaceHolderMain_ctl01__ControlWrapper_RichHtmlField');

Note that there's no need for the el variable or the do-while loop. You probably need to do some trial-and-error, using alert() statements to view the p.innerHtml and/or p.parentNode.innerHtml; this helped me discover what p was pointing to after the do-while and simply reference it directly.