views sort by ... date handler not present/not working

At first, when adding this date field handler, I got a 'function not found ' error referring to $data = term_fields_format_date($data); in views/term_fields_handler_field_date.inc . Then, when using the 'sort by ' date type term field, it didn't order them correctly. I waded a little into the views classes, fields, handlers, but quickly got lost.