Generate a tabbed submenu — from taxonomy term or submenu item — with sample content

I’m looking to generate a tabbed submenu from taxonomy term or submenu item and include sample content (three items per term/submenuu item). The styling I can do, the problem is the html generation.

I see this style called tabbed submenus, fat menus, or mega menus. A good sample is the tabbed submenus at Vice.com. The end result looks like this:

Home | Taxonomy1 | Taxonomy2 | Taxonomy3 | CustomMenu
——————————————————           —————————————————————————
T2term1|   (content1 image)   (content2 image)  (content3 image)
T2term2<   Content1 Title     Content2 Title    Content3 Title
T2temr3|           Link: See All Stories in T2Term2

One issue is that three of our menus are essentially all terms for three custom taxonomies while the fourth is a custom menu made from admin-selected terms in tags taxonomy.

We’ve purchased Max Mega Menus as a possible solution only to find out it doesn’t support tabbed submenus.

I’m finding the options are to buy a more expensive plugin that may or may not work (and definitely will have a CSS fight with our Zurb Foundation based theme) or find custom code that perhaps we can drop into the Foundation menus or into Max Mega Menu.

Any pointers appreciated — I’m finding this hard to solve with Google searches since the terminology is not set and every shady plugin author wants to sell a (possibly outdated) solution without a trial and a lot of plugins seem like ripoffs of other plugins.

I ended up solving this problem with Ubermenu.

What I wanted to write was complex enough that it made more sense to get a tested, commercial plugin that had the features I need. MaxMegaMenu didn’t do tabbed content but Ubermenu does.

I’m able to construct menus like this:

Taxonomy1
  [Tabs]
    [DynamicTerms]
      [Dynamic Posts]
Taxonomy2
  [Tabs]
    [DynamicTerms]
      [Dynamic Posts]

etc. The end result looks great, it integrated well enough with my custom theme (though I had to convert their LESS to SASS for Foundation compatibility), it does sticky and mobile menus as well, and it’s well supported.