In SharePoint 2010, if you have more than one web part on a web part page, the ribbon disappears because SharePoint doesn't know which web part to display the ribbon for (this is by design because if you have a document library web part and a list web part on the same page, the ribbons are obviously different for the two and SharePoint needs to know which web part to display the ribbon for).
Once you select a web part (by clicking on it) the selected web part will become "active" and the correct ribbon will show up.
Is there a way to automatically select a list view web part on load? Can this be done via javascript or a querystring SharePoint can understand?
For example, if I have a document library web part and a list view web part on a page, I want the document library web part to be selected by default and the document library ribbon to show when the page is first loaded.