Add "external" link to admin menu in the backend

Question

Trying to add a link to my admin menu (dashboard/backend) that leads to the frontend of wordpress, so I basically want a link in the menu that takes me to the blog.

I've found a couple of ways to add new stuff to the admin menu, but I haven't been able to link to the home_url, it seems like the admin menu only is designed to let you link to stuff within the wp-admin. Anyone that have succeeded with this?

Edit:
Tried with this: https://gist.github.com/792b7aa5b695d1092520

add_admin_menu_item('Overview',array( 
      'title' => 'View Site',
      'slug' => get_bloginfo('url')
  ));

Which gives me the link hxxp://myurl.com/myurl.com
With this plugin (hxxp://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/admin-menu-editor/), I get:
hxxp://myurl.com/wp-admin/www.test.com

Answer 1

you can create a function that redirects to the front-end like this:

function redirect_home_987(){
  wp_redirect( home_url() ); 
  exit;
}

and call that function in WordPress default add_menu_page function like this:

add_menu_page( 'redirecting', 'View Site', 'read', 'my-top-level-handle', 'redirect_home_987');

Hope this helps

Answer 2

The name of site (top left, next to WP logo) links to front-end, is that not sufficient?

Also it would help if you included code that you had tried so far in the question.

Answer 3

You cannot add items to the admin menus that point to external URLs, the menu addition functions do not support this, nor will they allow it.

However, if you attach a callback onto the admin_menu hook, you can insert some items yourself manually and totally overcome the non-external URL problem. I do this myself and i'm quite surprised noone has already pointed out the issue with external menu links.

I provided an example when answering Adding an Arbitrary Link to the Admin Menu?

Let me know if that helps.

Answer 4

add_action('admin_menu', 'example_admin_menu');

/**
* add external link to Tools area
*/
function example_admin_menu() {
    global $submenu;
    $url = 'http://www.example.com/';
    $submenu['tools.php'][] = array('Example', 'manage_options', $url);
}

Answer 5

just add ../ as slug prefix:

add_admin_menu_item('Overview',array( 
  'title' => 'View Site',
  'slug' => '../slug'          // relative url
));