website: plugins section, wip

website/source/docs/plugins/index.html.md

@@ -0,0 +1,24 @@
+---
+layout: "docs"
+page_title: "Plugins"
+sidebar_current: "docs-plugins"
+---
+
+# Plugins
+
+Terraform is built on a plugin-based architecture. All providers and
+provisioners that are used in Terraform configurations are plugins, even
+the core types such as AWS and Heroku. Users of Terraform are able to
+write new plugins in order to support new functionality in Terraform.
+
+This section of the documentation gives a high-level overview of how
+to write plugins for Terraform. It does not hold your hand through the
+process, however, and expects a relatively high level of understanding
+of Go, provider semantics, Unix, etc.
+
+<div class="alert alert-block alert-warning">
+<strong>Advanced topic!</strong> Plugin development is a highly advanced
+topic in Terraform, and is not required knowledge for day-to-day usage.
+If you don't plan on writing any plugins, we recommend not reading
+this section of the documentation.
+</div>

website/source/docs/plugins/provider.html.md

@@ -0,0 +1,41 @@
+---
+layout: "docs"
+page_title: "Provider Plugins"
+sidebar_current: "docs-plugins-provider"
+---
+
+# Provider Plugins
+
+A provider in Terraform is responsible for the lifecycle of a resource:
+create, read, update, delete. An example of a provider is AWS, which
+can manage resources of type `aws_instance`, `aws_eip`, `aws_elb`, etc.
+
+The primary reasons to care about provider plugins are:
+
+  * You want to add a new resource type to an existing provider.
+
+  * You want to write a completely new provider for managing resource
+    types in a system not yet supported.
+
+  * You want to write a completely new provider for custom, internal
+    systems such as a private inventory management system.
+
+<div class="alert alert-block alert-warning">
+<strong>Advanced topic!</strong> Plugin development is a highly advanced
+topic in Terraform, and is not required knowledge for day-to-day usage.
+If you don't plan on writing any plugins, we recommend not reading
+this section of the documentation.
+</div>
+
+## Coming Soon!
+
+The documentation for writing custom providers is coming soon. In the
+mean time, you can look at how our
+[built-in providers are written](https://github.com/hashicorp/terraform/tree/master/builtin).
+We recommend copying as much as possible from our providers when working
+on yours.
+
+We're also rapidly working on improving the high-level helpers for
+writing providers. We expect that writing providers will become much
+easier very shortly, and acknowledge that writing them now is not the
+easiest thing to do.

website/source/layouts/docs.erb

@@ -123,6 +123,15 @@
 				</ul>
 				</li>
 
+				<li<%= sidebar_current("docs-plugins") %>>
+				<a href="/docs/plugins/index.html">Plugins</a>
+				<ul class="nav">
+					<li<%= sidebar_current("docs-plugins-provider") %>>
+					<a href="/docs/plugins/provider.html">Provider</a>
+					</li>
+				</ul>
+				</li>
+
 				<li<%= sidebar_current("docs-internals") %>>
 				<a href="/docs/internals/index.html">Internals</a>
 				<ul class="nav">