Can WordPress do this?

Is there a plugin in WordPress that can do this – a tabbed blog:

How would that work?

Example #1

I could pick a few Top Categories on my blog, e.g., Science, Media, Education, Politics and Other and assign each to one of the tabs. Thus, every time I post, I would have to use one or more Top Categories as well as second-level categories if and as many as I want to add. This way a reader can check out only my content of interest (e.g., Science) and not waste time on content of lesser interest (e.g., Politics). The reader would also be able to subscribe to only the feed for one of the tabs/categories and ignore the rest. I would also be able to, for example, import only the feeds of select Tabs into other services (e.g., facebook, friendfeed, twitter).

Example #2

A conference has multiple ‘tracks’ or rooms. Each of these has its own tab for (live)blogging. The official conference bloggers would log in to a particular account or be instructed to use a particular Top Category in order to have their posts appear under the correct tab.

Example #3

A group blog in which each co-blogger has his or her own tab (or even an entire multi-blog network which just appears on surface to be a single multi-author blog). Each person would either have a separate login/password which would automatically place their posts under the correct tab, or each person would have his/her own Top Category.

Settings

Depending on the needs and uses, the placement and order of tabs should be easy to manage by the bloggers. Possible options for such settings are:

– set up manually the order of tabs which always appears the same way to the readers. For example, I could place my Science tab to be the first one, Media as second, etc., thus providing Science as the top layer of the blog at all times.

– set it to “Random” so each time each reader comes to the site, the order of tabs (and thus which one is visible as the top layer) is different.

– set it in a way that Users can pick their own Default order of tabs. That may be good for official conference blogs as users may want to pick a “track” to follow. Or I can set it that way so my readers can choose which of my categories to see up on top each time they visit.

– set it for regular rotation, e.g., be able to tell WordPress to rotate all the tabs in a particular way (e.g., move them all one position to the left, moving the first tab back to become the last one, or the other way round, or random, etc.) at a particular time interval (e.g., every X days). This may be good for group blogs or networks or news-sites in which all co-bloggers/authors/topics post with the same frequency.

– have the order of tabs determined by the recency of posts in each tab, so the tab with the most recent post is the first (“left”, “top”), etc. This would be useful for multi-author blogs or blog networks where authors greatly vary in their frequency of posting – the rare new post by the infrequent blogger will be appearing up front for a while for readers who may not often check out that blogger.

– Ideally, one could do a hybrid of the above, e.g., a preset default for the top layer (Tab #1, e.g., the news homepage), while the order of the other tabs (individual topics or authors) would be ordered either randomly, or by timed schedules, or by the recency of the last posting.

Needless to say, it would be very easy to add, delete or rename tabs, and there would be either no limit or a very high limit (12? 20? stacked up in rows of 4-5?) to the number of tabs one can have.

What would a reader see?

All the reader would need to do is remember or bookmark a single URL. Clicking on tabs would expand the experience to a broader – and more organized – range of content.

In most cases, clicking on a tab would only change the content of the column in the middle. This makes sense for an individual blog with multiple categories, or a news-site, or a conference blog.

But in cases of some big multi-author blogs or multi-blog networks, clicking on the tab can possibly change much more – banner, URL, sidebars, About page (and other pages), background, font, etc. There would be a possibility to customize quite a lot, leaving only some agreed elements common to all the tabs.

So, does such a plugin exist? If not, would it be easy to make? Any takers taking a shot at it?