In many cases when creating extensions in Magento 2, it will be needed to add new menu items in the admin panel. This is quite easy, and I will show you how to do this and also add your custom icon to your main item, as you can also see in the hero image of this article.

By default, the admin session lifetime in Magento 2 is set to 900 seconds (15 minutes), and most of the time this is quite annoying. As this is a setting in the backend, we can change it quite easily.

Controllers are an important part of an extension if you want to create custom pages, either in backend or frontend. In this tutorial, we will create an admin controller and a frontend controller that will only return a text on the screen.

In this tutorial, we will build a basic extension for Magento 2. This extension will not work on its own. However it is the first step in the construction of any extension for Magento 2 of any type, and it is a mandatory step as well.