get_bloginfo() will return the url while bloginfo() echo's it immediately.

You can also use stylesheet_directory in place of template_url or if you don't want extra overhead of calling a function there should be a constant defined called TEMPLATE_DIRECTORY.

http://codex.wordpress.org/Template_Tags/bloginfo

You can use:

add_menu_page('Page title', 'Top-level menu title', 'administrator', 'my-top-level-handle', 'my_magic_function');

For more detail check out: WordPress Adding Administration Menus

;)

Quick question. How would I go about placing my plugin link in a specific area in the admin panel?

Basically I have a plugin and add this bit of code to add it to the admin nav panel.

add_action('admin_menu', 'mytheme_add_admin'); ?>

If I wanted to create a standalone link menu, what code would I change?

I'm a theme developer, and I still found it very useful for a couple of things I'm doing with theme options pages.

The only difficulty I had was the part about adding a CSS file to the admin head. In my case I'm not developing a plugin so I want the CSS link to reflect a file within my theme.

So, this is what I ended up doing:

function admin_register_head() {

echo '';

}

add_action('admin_head', 'admin_register_head');

This kind of funky method was because the "get_option" attribute (as you used in your post) doesn't have a template url option that I know of? And the bloginfo() function prints out the URL. I wasn't sure how to actually retrieve the URL to the theme folder and store in a variable.

So, if anyone knows a better way to accomplish this feel free to throw it out there, and if not, you can do it the way I did. It's not pretty, but it works :-)