Creating custom admin panel pages without making a plugin?

Question

I have some functionality on my site that I'd like the administrators to be able to handle without going directly into the database. I'm thinking that the cleanest way would be to create new pages within WP's own admin panel.

I've found lots of documentation on how to create menu pages (add_menu_page()), how to create forms within these menu pages, but most of the docs seem to assume that I'm creating a plugin.

I'm also not finding an answer to a fundamental question - where exactly am I writing the code for said custom menu pages? Would it be somewhere in /wp-admin?

Once I have it set up, I'm comfortable with implementing things functionally, I'm just stuck on how to create this menu page in the first place. Any help?

Answer 1

As you have seen, you only need to use the function add_menu_page (),

although the documentation assume that you created a new plugin this is not necesary to do it.

you can create a new file in your theme and use include_once at the end of functions.php or simply add these functions directly into functions.php