I'm using drupal 6x with a Zen custom theme.
The other day I was asked "Can we move those ugly tabs to the side bar and render them as links." I said sure and I had no idea how frustrated I was about to be. I ran into a lot of advice about rendering the tabs in a block, creating a module, moving the tabs with CSS and a few other ideas. Moving the tabs with CSS worked to a degree, but because other parts of my site needed to share that space, I really needed $tabs to print in a div in my custom region.
My first thought, was to move <? print $tabs ?> in page.tpl.php to the space on my page where I wanted them. I moved them so they would print in my custom region $right. Nothing showed up. In fact, the only place on my page I could get the tabs to render was in content-top in my content-header div.
Long story short, I solve the problem by storing $tabs in a variable and then printing the new variable where I wanted it on the page. Like this:
<?php if ($breadcrumb || $title || $tabs || $help || $messages): ?>
<div id="content-header">
<?php print $breadcrumb; ?>
<?php print $messages; ?>
<?php if ($tabs): ?>
<?php $newTabs="<div class='tabs'>".$tabs."</div>"; ?>
<?php endif; ?>
<?php print $help; ?>
</div> <!-- /#content-header -->
<?php endif; ?>
and then
<?php print $right; ?>
<div id="sidebar-right-page">
<div id="sidebar-right-inner" class="region region-right">
<?php print $right; ?>
<?php print $newTabs;?>
</div>
</div>
<?php endif; ?>
I removed the "tab" graphics and formatted the tabs the wanted to by editing tabs.css.
Hope this helps others with the same issue.