Creating a dashboard menu for your wordPress Plugin

In this short tutorial, we’ll show you ways to add various menus to the WordPress admin dashboard.

Add menu item hook 
This code snippet will add a menu menu item to the left side of the wordpress admin dashboard using the method add_menu_page.

public static function admin_menu() {
   add_menu_page(__('Menu 1','menu-test'), __('Menu 1','menu-test'), '', 'mt-top-level-handle','menu title', plugins_url( 'Menu/favicon.png' ), null);      
 }

Adding menus with submenus which hovers out
The code below will create a submenu attached to the main menu which hovers out on mouseover. Using the add_submenu_page() method.

add_submenu_page('mt-top-level-handle', __('menu 2','menu-test'), __('menu 2','menu-test'), 'manage_options', 'menu_2',  array ( __CLASS__, 'menu_2' ));

Removing Admin Menu item
These methods will remove items from the menu. Using the remove_submenu_page() method.

remove_menu_page(string $menu_slug);

remove_submenu_page( 'themes.php', 'widgets.php' );

Wrapping the menu system into its own method and invoke with wordpress hooks
The code below, will organise the menu system into its own method and using add_action()

add_action( 'admin_init', array( 'Admin', 'admin_init' ) );
add_action( 'admin_menu', array( 'Admin', 'admin_menu' ), 5 );

/**
* Create the Menu System
*/
public static function admin_menu() {
   add_menu_page(__('Admin','menu-test'), __('Admin','menu-test'), '', 'mt-top-level-handle','statistics', plugins_url( 'Admin/favicon.png' ), null);
   add_submenu_page('mt-top-level-handle', __('Admin Summary','menu-test'), __('Visitor Summary','menu-test'), 'manage_options', 'Admin_stats',  array ( __CLASS__, 'Admin_stats' )); 
   add_submenu_page('mt-top-level-handle', __('Admin Configuration','menu-test'), __('Configuration','menu-test'), 'manage_options', 'Admin_configuration',  array ( __CLASS__, 'Admin_configuration' ));
   add_submenu_page('mt-top-level-handle', __('Admin FAQ','menu-test'), __('FAQ','menu-test'), 'manage_options', 'Admin_faq',  array ( __CLASS__, 'Admin_faq' ));          
}