Vertical Tabs in Front End (Drupal 7)
The examples module will provide you some custom code to implement this, have a look at the API documentation which add a vertical tab to the node form.

The only restriction I can think of is that this code is for forms so if you want to theme a node output you should use jQUery UI tabs. The tutorial you linked seems fine, but you'll need to change a little its CSS classes in order to output vertical tabs, compare its code tho this demo.