Wiki (ish) formatting outside of a wiki

[swiftone]

I have a project where users are uploading text to be displayed on the web. This text is intended to be plain text, but some minor markup on the web pages would be fine. Some of the wikis I've seen use intuitive plain text standards (e.g. *bold*, /italics/) so I'd like to tap into those.

Here's the problem. The site isn't intended as a wiki. So I have either full-blown configurable wikis that don't have (documented) interfaces for outside control, or stand-alone modules that don't let me (easily) pick/alter their formatting choices.

• Kwiki (and its predecessor CGI::Kwiki) seems like it has all the configurability I want, along with an almost "correct" set of defaults, but it's so interwoven with the undocumented Spoon/Spiffy set that I was unable to find an easy interface to just steal the formatting.
• Text::WikiFormat is standalone just like I want, but it doesn't appear to let me easily change it's formatting rules, and it's defaults aren't obvious to my non-technical audience. (I want the wiki-text to look, well, normal, before formatting.)
• Text::Tiki is in much the same boat. I like its default text handlers, but its image and hyperlinking isn't what I'm looking for, and it doesn't let me tweak any of that easily.
• CGI::Wiki, CGI::pWiki. and the others don't seem useful for this problem either.

So does someone know how I can do what I want, or will I have to steal the regexes etc. from the above and reinvent my wheel, or twist a wiki to the behavior I want?