Preface - it will be significant rework in any case, future maintaining (for sync with upsteam code) - well... headache... But if you still ready for adventure - http://docs.elgg.org/wiki/Plugin_development and http://docs.elgg.org/wiki/Tutorials/Blog (slightly outdated, as it was mentioned some times)

And in any case - you'll have to learn how to work the original code on the same level as it's author

@adclose, it will require rework - if I can't do some programming tasks in Elgg it doesn't mean that I can't see what and how must be done for getting needed results, because (for good Elgg's plugin) we'll expect

• Ouput must be rewritten in oder to use views
• Different part's access must be determined by Elgg ACL-system
• Plugin's entry points must have transparent integration into Elgg (topbar menu, profile/user menu)
• Plugin data must be stored by Elgg way (metadatas)
• Some more details, which I miss in this "draft thining"

It's a big task, MyHTML can solve just one small andl less significant part of jobs for such project