You can link to tabs or accordions in different ways:

  • URL with hash tag
  • URL with tab/accordion variable

URL with hash tag

By default, clicking on a tab or accordion will add a hash tag to the url, like:
www.mydomain.com/some/page#my-tab

When visiting that url directly, the page will automatically be loaded with tab 'My Tab' as open / active.

You can switch off the option to automatically add the hash tag in the Tabs system plugin settings.

The tab or accordion alias that is placed in the url hash tag is based on the title of the tab. You can set this alias to anything you want by adding an alias parameter to the tag, with this syntax:

{tab title="My Tab" alias="my-alias"}

Then the url will look like this:
www.mydomain.com/some/page#my-alias

Keep in mind that the alias should be unique. Otherwise only the first tab or accordion on the page with that alias will be set as active.

URL with tab variable

Alternatively you can also force a tab or accordion to open via a variable in the url :
www.mydomain.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=123&tab=Tab Title 2
www.mydomain.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=123&accordion=Accordion Title 2
or
www.mydomain.com/some/page?tab=tabtitle2
www.mydomain.com/some/page?accordion=accordiontitle2

You can use the title of the tab in different formats, such as lower case, spaces, special characters, etc.
So to make the tab 'It's cool!' active, you can use any of these in the url:

  • It's cool! or It's%20cool!
  • It'scool!
  • its-cool
  • itscool

If you have given the tab a custom alias (as described above under URL with hash tag), you can use that as well:
tab=my-alias
accordion=my-alias

You can also simply use the number of the tab (1, 2, etc).
So if this is the 3rd tab you can also use:
tab=3
accordion

If you have multiple tab sets on the page, that will only make the 3rd tab of the first set on the page active.

To make the 3rd tab of the 2nd set active - for instance - you can use:
tab=2-3
accordion=2-3