I am writing a help-desk sort of software in PHP strictly for the internal use of the company I work for. It is along the lines of a forum except that it's not conversation based. It had to have very specific fields, forms, and functions so unfortunately I have had to write this from the ground up.

Anyway, in this project of mine, people can post information very much like the vBulletin form I'm writing this post in now. And in my project, I'd like to make it easy for people to format their post with bolds, italics, underlines, colors, and post things such as URLs and email addresses easily without having to know HTML code. But I have no idea how.

Now I'm not asking for someone to post vBulletin's source code, I'd rather write my own. However, I'd be grateful if someone could help me get started by telling me how to get this done. I'm pretty sure that I have to use another scripting language like VBScript.

Any ideas? Thanks