Drupal - How would I go about creating my own custom view?

Question

What would be the best way of creating my own custom view?

I want to have my page do some specific stuff. For example, I am creating a search directory for different names. But, there will be 3 different types of search functions and I would like to toggle between them with 3 different tabs (each tab goes to a different search function). Would this be all in one view with then 3 blocks or multiple views selected by different tabs? What would be the best way of doing this?

One of the search functions will list all of the names alphabetically and there will be an alphabetical directory at the top that will bring the user to the corresponding letter that they select on the page. I believe that this will have to be a custom view that I will need to create, but I have never done anything like this before.

Does anyone have any good advice as to how I would go about doing this? Do I have to create my own module first? Are there any good tutorials out there that would help?

Thanks!

Answer 1

I'd recommend giving https://drupal.org/project/quicktabs a try. I haven't used it myself, but I know of others that have.

The project page sidebar has links to docu and a demo with some screenshots of config.

If you're going to be reusing almost all of the settings between blocks you'd want to create different blocks displays within the same view and override what you need to.