Open custom Wordpress admin menu item in external URL - wordpress

Question

I have this code snippet which creates custom Wprdpress admin menu items and they show up nicely. Since these are links to the external URL I would like to open them in the external tab. Can’t figure out how to to that though. Any suggestion would be appreciated.
add_action('admin_menu', 'admin_menu_add_external_links_as_submenu');
function admin_menu_add_external_links_as_submenu() {
global $submenu;
$menu_slug = "externallink"; // used as "key" in menus
$menu_pos = 1; // whatever position you want your menu to appear
// create the top level menu
add_menu_page( 'external_link', 'Tutorials', 'read', $menu_slug, '', '', $menu_pos);
// add the external links to the slug you used when adding the top level menu
$submenu[$menu_slug][] = array('Yahoo', 'manage_options', 'https://www.yahoo.com/');
$submenu[$menu_slug][] = array('Google', 'manage_options', 'https://www.google.com/');
}

Answer 1

To make it work as you expect you have to create the extra jQuery function admin_menu_add_external_links_as_submenu_jquery which will open your submenu items in a new tab. This function is checking for the div's ID which is now set for each of your submenu items newtab and newtab2 and the final result is target: _blank (new window) output. Code goes into your active theme or child theme functions.php file. Tested and works.
add_action('admin_menu', 'admin_menu_add_external_links_as_submenu');
add_action( 'admin_head', 'admin_menu_add_external_links_as_submenu_jquery' );
function admin_menu_add_external_links_as_submenu() {
global $submenu;
$menu_slug = "externallink"; // used as "key" in menus
$menu_pos = 1; // whatever position you want your menu to appear
// create the top level menu
add_menu_page( 'external_link', 'Tutorials', 'read', $menu_slug, '', '', $menu_pos);
// add the external links to the slug you used when adding the top level menu
$submenu[$menu_slug][] = array('<div id="newtab">Yahoo</div>', 'manage_options', 'https://www.yahoo.com/');
$submenu[$menu_slug][] = array('<div id="newtab2">Google</div>', 'manage_options', 'https://www.google.com/');
}
function admin_menu_add_external_links_as_submenu_jquery()
{
?>
<script type="text/javascript">
jQuery(document).ready( function($) {
$('#newtab').parent().attr('target','_blank');
$('#newtab2').parent().attr('target','_blank');
});
</script>
<?php
}