How to Add Custom Product Tabs to WooCommerce
This free plugin for WooCommerce lets you add a custom tab to the product view page. The new tab is easily configured from the Product admin page where you can set the tab name, and content containing plaintext, HTML or shortcodes. This plugin has been tested with the Wootique theme, but should be compatible with any WooCommerce theme.
Create the Custom Tab
View the Custom Tab
Installation and Usage
- Upload the entire ‘woocommerce-product-tabs-lite’ folder to the ‘/wp-content/plugins/’ directory
- Activate the plugin through the ‘Plugins’ menu in WordPress
- Edit a product, then click on ‘Custom Tab’ within the ‘Product Data’ panel
Get the Plugin
- Visit the WooCommerce Custom Product Tabs Lite WordPress Plugin Page
- or Search for ‘WooCommerce Custom Product Tabs Lite’ from within your WordPress admin
Support & Feedback
Thanks for trying this extension. As always, if you have any questions, issues or feedback, don’t hesitate to get in touch by leaving a comment below, using our contact form, or emailing.
Thank you for this great plugin! One question though, what lines do I need to change in order to create a second custom tab? Thank you!
Hey Roy, thanks for stopping by and checking out my plugin. If you’re familiar with PHP development then adding support for additional tabs would be pretty straightforward; it would require changing the code in a number of places though, more than would be easy to explain here. I don’t know how big of a rush you are in, but I can tell you that someone else is working on a paid extension for WooCommerce that will allow for additional tabs, and a lot more control over the tabs than my little free plugin offers. I don’t know when it will be available, but when it is I’ll link to it from here. I’ll try and take some time in the future to make this plugin support additional tabs, but for now I hope this helps. Thanks again
Thank you. I’ve been coding in PHP for 5 years, WordPress however is kinda new to me. Probably I’ll figure it out somehow, thank you for your work. You’ve made some people in the Netherlands very happy.
I’m glad to hear it! Thanks for the kind words
I have just installed your plugin. But all I see is a tab and no option to add text.
WooCommerce 1.52-1
This would be a great addition if it would work and is exactly what I have been looking for..
I look forward to your response.
Thank you very much for taking the time to let me know about this. That bug should now be fixed in the 1.0.2 release. Please let me know if you have any other issues with the plugin. Thanks again.
Brilliant!
Thank you very much.
Bob
How can i add a new tab to all product pages?
Hey koen, thanks for your interest and for the question. I’m afraid I haven’t provided a way to add a tab to all product pages with this plugin. The good news is that someone else is working on a full featured tab manager for WooCommerce, which will have this feature along with many more, and which will be available as a paid plugin at the WooCommerce site once it’s released. I don’t know exactly when it will be released, but once it is I will certainly add a link to it from this page. Hope this helps
would this be a solution justin?
http://www.benblanco.com/2012/03/17/how-to-add-custom-product-tab-to-woocommerce-single-product-page/
Hey Ryan, thanks for visiting, and for the question. I’ll just need a little bit of clarification: would that be a solution to what? The benblanco product tab solution is very similar to mine, they essentially both solve the same problem. If you give me a bit more info I’ll do my best to answer your question more fully. Thanks!
Hiya! I installed your plugin and while it shows up in the admin area, it doesn’t show up at all on the front-end…I’m sure general tabs need to be enabled and I’m not sure how to do that…here’s the site i’m talking about:
http://amberweinberg.com/clients/orion/shop/zyflamend-wholebody-60sg/
Thanks!
Hey Amber, thanks for giving my plugin a try, and for getting in touch. Whelp, my plugin depends on the
'woocommerce_product_tabs'action, which is done by thesingle-product/tabs.phptemplate. The whole chain of events that happens with, for instance my Wootique theme is:templates/single-product.phpcallswoocommerce_single_product_content()which does the action'woocommerce_before_single_product_summary', whichwoocommerce_output_product_data_tabs()is hooked onto, which finally loads thesingle-product/tabs.phptemplate that we started with. Which theme are you using? If it’s overriding any of those pieces, or doesn’t initiate that process, then the tabs definitely wouldn’t render. I know some theme providers, like Genesis for instance, have Connect plugins to integrate more fully with WooCommerce. Let me know if I can be of any more assistance.I’ve disabled the tab functionality and would like to call the custom-product tab info directly. I tried:
custom_product_tabs();?>
Without luck… Any ideas to just load the function directly..?
Thanks
Hey Elliot, well it’s a little bit trickier than just calling that method directly. You have to hook it into the ‘woocommerce_product_tabs’ action, and then there’s also the custom_product_tabs_panel() function which includes the actual content and must be hooked into the ‘woocommerce_product_tab_panels’ action. Hope this helps!
Hey came across this. Thanks very much.
to enable native WP Embed Support http://codex.wordpress.org/Embeds you can make one addition and one change to custom_product_tabs_panel() method
1. add “$embed = new WP_Embed();” just before the foreach
2. wrap the apply filters call “echo $embed->autoembed(apply_filters(…));”
Cheers
Ant
Hey Ant, thanks for trying out my plugin, and thanks for leaving the tip. I’m sure people will find it useful, and perhaps I’ll include it in the next release of the plugin.
Great plugin–just what I needed! My shortcodes aren’t working, though–any idea what I need to do to fix ‘em? Thanks!
http://www.rebeccaclarke.org/shop-rebecca-clarke/shop/the-cloths-of-heaven/
Hey Emily, thanks for trying out my plugin, and sorry about the shortcode not working. I’m curious, can you tell me which plugin you’re using for the audio shortcodes? Also, does the audio shortcode work in the product main description, and do any other shortcodes work in the custom tab? I’ve seen that at least the Tubepress plugin implements their shortcodes in a seemingly odd way such that they work only in the post main content, so I’m wondering whether this is another case like that one. Let me know
I’m using WP Audio (http://wpaudioplayer.com/). Yes, it works in the main product description field. I just tried GT Tabs shortcode–same thing (works in main description but not custom tab).
Is there a shortcode that you know for sure works in there that I could try?
Thanks for your help!
Ha, weird, that’s what I was afraid of. Unfortunately I don’t have any suggestions for another audio player as I just don’t have any experience with them. If you are able to find one that works, definitely comment back here, I’d love to know for future reference. Sorry I don’t have a better answer for you, but I hope you’re able to find one that’s compatible!
Looks like Haiku works–it’s not as elegant as WP Audio, but it does the job.
Followup question–how can I get rid of the extra tab label (i.e. “Audio Samples” is on the tab and then it’s listed in the body of the content as well)?
Glad you found one that works at least. The easiest way to hide the extra title (without modifying the plugin) would be by adding the following snippet to your custom css file:
#tab-audio-samples h2 { display:none; }Perfect, thanks Justin!
Hi Justin,
Do you know if that plugin for multiple extra tabs was ever developed? I had a look but can’t find it. Thanks for your it’s great.. I just need another one:)
actually Justin I found a work around this ! and just wondering if you would know if it’s going to cause me problems. There is another plugin for 1 custom tab available so I installed both that one and yours and now have 2 tabs !! do you think that’s ok for me to do or may it cause probs? seems ok so far !!
You know I’m actually working on a new paid version of the plugin now with multiple tabs and all sorts of other improvements and goodies, so I hope to have that available before all too long. Until that point, as long as you test your site with the two plugins installed and don’t see find issues, I think you should be fine; I seem to recall someone else mentioning to me that they used both plugins, so you’re probably not the first. Hope this helps
thanks for your quick reply
. I look forward to seeing your new plugin
You got it, I’ll post back here once it’s finished
great plugin. in addition to custom tabs per each product, i’m needing to provide tabs that are the same across all products.
i am interested to know if you were planning on doing this in your next release as it is a logical step. if not, I’m working on developing this hard-wired into a theme because i need it right away but would be happy to work with you to implement this within your plugin.
Hey Jerry, thanks very much. Yes, “global” or “static” tabs across all products is definitely going to be part of the new plugin. Thanks for the offer, I may hit you up for some feedback if you’re up for it
hit me
Justin,
Great plugin, but like everyone else just counting down the moment when you have the paid-for version with the multiple tabs and “other goodies” ready. I was going to pay a developer to do exactly this thing, but found your plugin. It’s just that I need more tabs than one to make up for the fact that I don’t want to populate tabs with woo commerce stuff.
You’re going to have it ready when? (Can’t be soon enough). You looking for someone to do some testing and give feedback while in development of a new ecommerce site?
Hey Mike, I know I’m long overdue to get this extension completed, and believe me I really want to wrap it up and get it for sale. Don’t have a timeframe yet, but I’ll be in touch
I’ll be open to testing as well. Looking forward to this plugin and thanks for taking it on.
Why thank you very much Ryan! The plugin is actually in the final stages, so it shouldn’t be long now
Hi,
quick question, i am using a plugin to import all my data into woocommerce,
if I setup lets say 3 tabs, how can I import data into them ? What are the fields called ?
Hey Joe, no real convenient way of doing that I’m afraid. This plugin only provides a single custom tab anyways
Hi,
Is it possible to add the option to “Automatically add paragraphs” instead of having to add the tag to every new sentence? I want to use the Custom Tab as the product specification tab and list all of the specs. But I have many products and it would be very time consuming to add the or the tag to every line of the text on each product page.
Sure, the best way right now would be to add a filter like the following to your functions.php:
add_filter( ‘woocommerce_custom_product_tabs_lite_content’, ‘tab_content_autop’, 10, 2 );
function tab_content_autop( $content, $tab_id ) {
return wpautop( $content );
}
Hope this helps!
This works perfect! Thanks.
Hi Justin,
I want this multi-tab plugin “yesterday”
— Is it on its way?
Will it come with tinymce editor built in and will it take shortcode and what not…?
Thanks!
Hey Louis, heh, yeah a lot of people needed this “yesterday”, and I feel badly that I couldn’t deliver it, but it’s in the final stages now so it hopefully shouldn’t be much longer. The new one will have the “quick tags” editor at the product level, which are those buttons that show up when you click on the “HTML” tab of the editor. Due to technical limitations the TinyMCE editor, which shows up on the “Visual” side will be available in a different edit screen within the plugin where all tabs are listed (similar to how all posts, or all products are listed); it’s difficult to explain exactly what I mean, but hopefully it will be clear within the plugin. Oh yes, and it will allow shortcodes, it should behave exactly like post or product content.
Thanks Justin! I think I know what you mean
Yeah, because many themes come with custom shortcodes to do x, y and z, like columns, buttons, horizontal rules etc… and you can generate these from a drop down menu in the page/post editor. It sounds like it’s going to be a great plugin!
Are you making the multi-tab plugin or another developer? Came late to the comments, sorry. And, any idea if it will show up on Woo in September —
Hey Ben, I’ve actually finished the multi-tab plugin and submitted it to WooCommerce for review. If they’re happy with it it may even be available this september if we’re lucky.
Justin,
This is great news! Please….please keep the heat on the folks at woo themes to get it done and posted ASAP. The timing for me couldn’t be better (unless of course it was today). Can you please post a notice on this forum when they approve so we can jump right on it.
Thanks, Mike
Hey Mike, believe me, I’ll be yelling from the rooftops when the plugin is approved and available for sale
I hear you already
The extra Tab does not seem to support the use of shortcodes within its content. Is there a way to add this functionality?
Hey Robb, well it actually should work with the majority of shortcodes, what I find is that occasionally shortcodes added by a particular plugin will work only within the main product content area. Tubepress, and wpaudioplayer are two such examples. So, I would say to just verify that one of the built-in shortcodes, like [embed] works, and if it does then let me know the name of this other shortcode you’re trying to use that does not work, and I’ll add it to my incompatible list. Thanks!
The WordPress theme I am using is an ecommerce theme called “Abundance” that I got from themeforest.net – even their shortcode for adding a button does not render. The other shortcode I tried was “RPS Include Content” which allows you to duplicate page content hrough the use of a shortcode which references the page/post id. I would show you an example but my clients site is behind a under construction page which requires a login.
Ok, thanks for the additional info. And did you try out the [embed] shortcode to verify that a properly-implemented one works? ie: [embed]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nTDNLUzjkpg[/embed]
Placing [embed] in the main description area or on a standard page renders nothing. In the custom tab with a heading it renders simply as [embed]
Right, it needs to have for instance the URL for a youtube video before the closing shortcode tag. Ie:
[embed]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nTDNLUzjkpg[/embed]
NIce – I have a Taxxas car too! Anyway, the [embed]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nTDNLUzjkpg[/embed] works only in the main body of the product description and not in your tab. I am using your version 1.0.3
Ohhhhh, I added support for shortcodes in 1.1.0, so that would explain it. If you update, it should work, and hopefully even the themeforest and other shortcodes as well. best of luck
Hi Justin, is the extension going to be released before Friday? I am not sure if you are aware but they have this new policy coming, as well this 30% off discount going on right now. How I can make the move before it’s “too late”.
Me and other aren’t liking their new deals…
Hey Louis, I did see the announcement about the new policy. I know it’s going to be met with some mixed feelings by the community, but I do think it’s the right thing to do in the long-term. I know it might look unfair from the customer’s viewpoint, but as a plugin author myself, I know all too well the massive investment of time and resources that is required to build, maintain and support these plugins, and I just have a few! For Woo to be able to afford the kind of support the community rightfully expects and demands, well, they have to figure out a way for it to make business sense. In any event I hope you stick with Woo, I know I will be. As far as your real question, I’m afraid as a plugin author I just don’t have much control over when exactly a plugin is released. I submit it for review, along with a slew of other authors with other projects, and the WooCommerce dev team reviews and audits them as quickly as they can, so it’s all a matter of how many other plugins are ahead of mine to be reviewed, and whether they want me to make any changes to mine before it can be released. Sorry I don’t have a concrete date for you, but rest assured I’m doing all that I can to get it live.
Hi Justin, thanks for the info, I appreciate it and I understand your position.
The thing is, a months ago I wasn’t told any of this — yet I am 500% sure that this wasn’t planed overnight — I feel betrayed and used + pulled in.
I was told that they would help me in the support forum… Right now my experience with the new support ticket system is awful. Period. I feel they don’t read emails properly, too many back and forth, and loads of “sorry for the confusion — yes you can do that”…
I am being told to “learn php”, and to check the Woocommerce codex, or look for a Woocommerce “Woo ninja”. Woowooo — I am sure Ben Stiller is going to show is face soon…
Yet, I WAS TOLD during my pre-sales questions a month ago, that I would get help from the support forum — which is now “R.I.P” !!!
As for your comment: “For Woo to be able to afford the kind of support the community rightfully expects and demands, well, they have to figure out a way for it to make business sense.”
What “kind” of support??? They KILLED the community already — they killed the private support forum. Very bad move. Bad omen on it’s way.
I won’t be buying any extensions after Friday — too many ongoing deceptions. I’ll look elsewhere — no worries.
Also, I hate people and companies who invade my privacy, for instance we already have Facebook, Twitter and the government — a great “bundle”…
Now Magnus from Woothemes boasted publicly with pride that the domains will be “mapped”, and they will know who is using what… I don’t want strangers to stalk on me and my sites, especially when I have given money already — that’s freaking rude. I hate spies and nosy people who respect nobody but themselves. My very first gut instinct was to not even think of demoing something like Woocommerce. I was right. Not surprise, got a good nose this kind of things.
Anyway — rant over, you are a cool guy and I get on well with you. I know you’ll do well, I understand what you said about your situation. I have nothing against you.
If you feel that my message is “too strong”, you can remove it Justin , I don’t have a problem with that — I don’t want you to get the impression that I am “polluting”. That’s just the way I feel, and I speak from experience and my sure I am not the only one out there. Unfortunately, Woocommerce is targeting donkeys.
Louis,
While I understand the move they need to make with pricing plug-ins in order to run their business on a viable financial footing, and the need to reward the hard work of developers like Justin, I share your frustration with the folks at Woo. Their current support scheme is a joke and they need to be forthcoming about the future plans.
I don’t want to see Justin’s forum turn into a Woo-bash, but it is clear that a Woo user community forum is desperately needed. Ideally this should be authorized and moderated by Woo. However, if they don’t do the right thing, then some one else needs to. There’s no debate about the value of a free and open conversation, and flow of ideas, help and suggestions from a community of users, it is what makes for a successful software product. If they don’t see the wisdom in that, then ultimately they will crash and burn.
In the meantime, Justin, thanks for stepping up to produce the multi-tab plug-in. In order for Woo to be successful, they will need to rely on developers such as yourself to do the things they can’t. It is unreasonable for them (as they seem inclined) to expect the user community to read WP codex, Woo codes, and become proficient enough in all this, and PHP, to make use of their system. If they think that’s their path to success they are going to be disappointed.
One last thing – you may be familiar with the Soliloquy plug-in? Take a look at his business model. He seems to be running independent of Woo with WP plug-in business model and doing well enough. ALthough his product is not dependent on the Woo theme system, it is definitely superior to their slider system – I was willing to pay the bucks for the premium version because I found the built-in Woo slider system to be too klunky and poorly documented.
Hey Guys, well to be perfectly honest, I don’t view either of these comments as strictly Woo-bashing; bashing in my mind would be to attack a company or person or position or what have you without any supporting statements. That is to say, something like “I hate WooCommerce because WooThemes made it” would be bashing, and not particularly useful. I get the feeling that you’d like to use WooCommerce and see Woo do the right thing, but you’re not happy with some of their decisions as of late, which is perfectly reasonable. The points that you guys are bringing up are well-thought out and perhaps legitimate, and so I think the conversation is actually a great, and necessary one, and helps me at least to understand how actual users of WC are feeling.
Of course as a 3rd party developer I don’t have a huge amount of insight into the decision making process at Woo, but I know some very smart folks who work there and I have the impression that they make the best decisions they can both for their business, as well as the community. I know that they will not purposefully alienate or destroy the community they’ve worked so hard to build up around WooCommerce.
I’ll admit I was initially pretty surprised when they got rid of the support forum, but if I recall correctly, according to their announcement post their reasoning was essentially that not enough members of the community were answering questions, and there were too many duplicate issues, and customers weren’t getting their questions answered correctly or in a timely-enough manner. So they invested quite a bit of time and effort moving over to the uservoice-based ticket system. Now, I’ve never tried requesting support on it, so I don’t know what it’s like, but I know that their intensions are in the right place, and I’m sure they’ll continue refining and improving the system until it works the best for the most people. Perhaps a WooCommerce-dedicated community forum is needed, and if so I’m guessing someone will provide one. I even considered it myself, but I’ve got a lot going on as it is, and I was somewhat afraid that a forum would become a ton of people asking questions and only myself answering them. For a forum to work there has to be community involvement from both directions; perhaps the community just isn’t big enough yet to support that kind of interaction, who knows.
My understanding with the new licensing scheme is that basically boils down to not being able to get support or updates for plugins on unlicensed-sites. I can understand being upset from a customer perspective because they were so loose with this previously, but really the idea of licensing per site, or allowing for a more expensive multi-site license is a pretty standard industry practice, and I don’t think too unreasonable.
On a broader note, WooCommerce is trying to solve an extremely difficult problem: how to create a general, functional ecommerce solution that can be used to support a basically infinite range of business models and site looks and feels. They’ve taken the tact of minimal configuration, and easy overriding/modification of behavior by, yes PHP coding. It’s great for me as a developer, but I can understand the frustration of a non-coder. The thing is, take a look at another popular ecommerce option: Magento. Magento arguably offers more “out of the box” functionality, but with a ridiculously complex admin interface, which you practically have to be an expert in to use effectively. And while they do have a (fantastically engineered) plugin system, it’s so complex that even a decent developer will require quite a while before they become proficient in it. So WooCommerce is trying to strike a balance between “just working” and requiring coding knowledge to modify. Is it perfect? perhaps not, but it’s the most usable and best of any other options I’ve seen so far.
Thanks again for the discussion guys
Hey Justin, that was a looooooooooooooong post of yours
For me coming here, it’s like going to a nice coffee shop… lovely atmosphere and great vibe.
On a different topic — did you see my fox video? Although I shot this a while ago, maybe I was inspired by your site!
Foxrunsoftware is the place to check.
Hey Louis, yeah, the comments always look a lot more reasonable in the wide editing box, as compared with the super-squashed display here, ha ha.
Why thank you for the compliment! I strive for a friendly inviting atmosphere, and it makes me very happy to see some discussion happening between readers such as yourself and Mike.
Nice work with the fox video, I like it! Though I’ll admit despite the fact this is Fox Run Software I’ve soured somewhat on real foxes ever since my outdoor/indoor cat of 13 years went missing earlier this summer, with the prime suspect being a local fox. Course it could have been any number of other things, but I have my suspicions, and I’m not as excited to see it lurking around the house as I used to be
Sorry to hear about your run-in with the neighborhood fox. Around here we have to worry about coyotes…and they are a lot more aggressive than a fox. There’s instances of coyotes snatching dogs when owners are walking them on a leash…poof, no more fluffy.
Thanks Mike, yeah coyotes are definitely a bigger problem for all household pets, no doubt about it. We supposedly also have them in the area, though I’ve yet to see or hear one. The fox I actually happened to catch on my infrared game camera the night my cat went missing, and I’ve seen it again since. I guess a fox will take a cat on average every 6-10 years or so. It was a pretty painful experience and needless to say, I don’t let her sister out at night any longer.
Very sorry to hear about your cat Justin, I share your sorrow.
It was just one of these moments, I caught them and they didn’t see me, it was quite spectacular, they were jumping like mad men — never seen any like this and so close. I am not a fox “fanatic” though, I’ll shoot anything “interesting” really — the bird was way long gone… there was nothing I could do help it. Well, it’s England you know, the “government” is doing nothing about it, so there are thousands of “homeless” foxes out there.
As Mike said — coyotes, that sound pretty freaking_not so awesome !
Thanks Louis, I appreciate it. It was a risk I knowingly took, allowing her to be an outdoor cat, something all the animal groups tell you not to do. I know the foxes were here first too, and they’re just doing what they do.
Hi Justin,
Any word yet on the multiple product tabs plugin for woo? They’ve launched their re-tooled website, see nothing there yet. I’m getting down to the short strokes on this, is there another way beyond waiting on them – given their apparent workload it seems like it could be many weeks more.
Mike
Dear sir how to add 3 custom tabs and How to add accept term and condition in checkout page
Please help me
Hey Harsha, there’s no easy way of adding a third tab, at least not until my Tab Manager plugin is accepted and live, which will hopefully be before all too long. To add a term and condition page is pretty easy: first go to Pages and create your terms and condition page. Next go to WooCommerce > Settings > Pages and select your newly created page where it says ‘Terms page ID’. Best of luck!
Your plugin is great, thank you for sharing it for free with the community. Wish i’ve known about it before i spent 4 hours figuring out to hook into the tabs file manually. now i have 2 new tabs (one hardcoded in the php file that pulls data from an atribute) and a cool one (yours) that is fully html editable, and that was exactly what my products needed.
I don’t actually have any questions or requests for you, but i figured that providing something this useful for free ( i posted some info on a free alternative to the woocommerce product feed plugin), was worthy of a word of appreciation.
Cheers from Romania
Thanks! Glad you found the plugin useful
Justin, Thanks so much for this plugin. I just wanted to add a tab to show a sizing chart for the clothing I am selling and this works like a charm! I didnt need the official plugin, and saved me $50 thanks to your work!
Ha ha, glad the free one worked out for you. Of course if you ever need the additional functionality like more tabs or tabs with shared content, give the paid one a try, I wrote it too!
Good Thanks for it.
Hi,
at first thanks for the great plugin. Is there an update to work with woocommerce 2.x available?
thanks
djb
Both the free and premium tab manager versions are fully compatible with 2.0. Feel free to test either one out with the latest woocommerce release candidate and let me know if you run into any issues
I had tried that plugin and it runs shortcodes like charm
The only issue I come up with this plugin is that it generates the tab title again the content area of the custom tab.
I had seen in the comments you’ve recommended to use CSS styling to hide the title but, unfortunately that CSS code also hides other H2 title on my custom tab. Isn’t there any different way to hide that tab title appearing again in my custom tab, without hiding other h2 titles?
Hey Pranjal, there’s no way with the free plugin to do this, though with a specific-enough CSS rule you should certainly be able to hide just the h2′s within the tab content without a problem. The premium tab manager plugin includes template files which allow you to more easily customize this sort of thing too. Hope this helps!
Hi there,
What shortcodes can you use with this plugin? I dont see any documentation so its hard to know how best to use it.
thanks
Hey Tadhg, thanks for the interset in our plugin and for the question. Now, are you asking what shortcodes can be used within the tab content, or what shortcodes does the plugin provide? If it’s the former, any properly written shortcode should work. Now, not all shortcodes seem to be properly written, and some will *only* function within the post description text for whatever reason; Tubepress comes to mind. If your question was the latter, this plugin does not create any shortcodes itself.