If you are like me, you have avoided diving into coding for the black hole that is Views. Every time I started to look at the mass amount of documentation, I went blind. There is no shortage of documentation and examples. Besides looking for how other modules have implemented Views, the following documentation is available.

• Views Developer Group Page
• Offical API
• Help file

Even with all of this documentation, something didn't quite click. Sure, I could do the easy stuff, like expose a new table to views or manipulate an existing view, but when it came it creating a custom handler, I was lost.

So today I'm sharing with you an example of a new custom handler. We had the need to create a modification of the taxonomy term filter that allowed for using multiple vocabularies. We also needed it to be in an exposed filter to be used in an administration screen.

Let's start by first looking at what is different, then at the current filter.

This is the last post in a 4 part series about Views, Views Bulk Operations, Actions and Features. In the first post of the series I walked through the Views Bulk Operations module. In the second post, a high level plan was put into place for the comment moderation feature. We also created the action plan that we followed for the final two posts. In the third post, we implemented several parts of our action plan. This included the view, creating the feature and coding the actions.

This post will finish up the comment moderation feature. Below is the action list. The bold items are addressed in this post.

Create View with 2 page panes.

A client recently had a requirement for what we call a canned search.  A canned search is simply a saved search with specific criteria that can be accessed directly at a URL.  This allows content editors to easily generate a list of various types of content suited to a specific topic without having to specifically link the items together in another manner.

As you might have guessed, Views is the primary engine for this feature.  However, it also uses a couple of other capabilities of Views that demonstrates another side to its already amazing flexibility.   Exposed filters is a well-known feature of Views allows a user to modify search criteria on the fly so that everything does not have to be determined ahead of time when the view is created, but one other less well-known feature is the ability to display those exposed filters separately in a block.  These are the primary builing blocks of our canned search feature.