Create admin menu items

In this lesson, we will learn how to create a custom menu item in the Magento admin panel. We will create a new heading named “Minerva” with a link named “FAQs” under the “Content” menu.

Setting Up Menu XML File

First, we need to create a new folder called adminhtml under the etc directory. Inside this folder, we will create a file named menu.xml. The menu.xml files are responsible for building out all of the menu functionality in the Magento admin.

We will start off with a menu root XML node of config with the no-namespace schema location set to the Magento backend’s menu.xsd file. The main node under config is menu, and it can have any number of add, remove, or update nodes. Since we want to create our own menu item, we will use add.

Adding Menu Items

There are many attributes on the add node, so to make things easier to read, it’s recommended to put attributes on their own lines.

The id for these add nodes follows a similar format to Access Control Lists (ACLs). First comes the vendor name, followed by an underscore, and then the module name with a colon. In our case, the id will be Macademy_Minerva::Minerva.

The title of the menu item will also be “Minerva”, and it will be set as a heading. To make it translatable, set the translate attribute equal to title. We also need to define the module responsible for this menu item, which will be Macademy_Minerva.

The last required attribute on menu items is the resource, which will be the ACL resource that we just set up. In this case, it will be the same name as our menu item, “Minerva”.

Nesting Menu Items

We want our “Minerva” heading to be displayed under the “Content” menu. To achieve this, add nodes can have a parent attribute. For our case, set the parent attribute to Magento_Backend::content.

To make sure our “Minerva” menu item comes after all the other items in the “Content” block, set the sort_order attribute equal to 900.

Creating a Sub-menu Item

A heading alone won’t be useful, so let’s create another add node for the “FAQs” sub-menu item. We will assign the id as Macademy_Minerva::faq, and the title will be “FAQs”. Set the translate attribute equal to title, and the module will be Macademy_Minerva.

The resource attribute will be equal to the resource that we set up for “FAQs”. For the parent attribute, set it equal to the “Minerva” heading’s id. This will ensure that the “FAQs” menu item appears underneath the “Minerva” menu item.

To create a link for the “FAQs” menu item, the add attribute accepts an optional action attribute. Set the action value equal to the URL that we want to send the admin user to relative to the admin URL. In our case, set it to minerva/faq.

Now, after saving the changes and refreshing the Magento admin, you will see the new “Minerva” heading with a link to “FAQs” under the “Content” menu.

Setting Up the Admin Route

Clicking on the “FAQs” link will currently give us an error page. Our next step is to set up the admin route for this menu item.