Creating a custom search page

Ok, so I am looking to create a custom search page for this website I am working on. They need some way for users to search for content by content type, keyword, tags, dates (for events only) or radius via zipcode. I have been trying to use views to create this, and while technically possible, it is proving to be more complicated than I had originally thought. Certain search options are only available for certain content types, and there are 7 different ones. For example events would need to have all of the search options, while forums would only need keyword and tag. I thought about making a different search page for each node type, but that is going to be too many pages for the user to easily search. There needs to be a way for users to change options easily and possibly select multiple content types at the same time. All of this leads me back to a single view, but I am just at a loss for where to start. Does anyone have any suggestions?

Also, does anyone know of a working module for showing exposed filters in views as checkboxes, I tried 3 different modules (views checkboxes, betterselect and views filter pack) with no success, none of them worked correctly or at all.