Hi and welcome to the forum.

I have had a WM18 that I converted to CNC and was very pleased with it. I am also helping another guy convert his to CNC. I used Linuxcnc as the controller with Mesa 5i25/7i76 cards. But to start you could just the a parallel port to keep the cost down. Linuxcnc is quite a steep learning curve. (its actually quite easy for a simple 3 axis machine with PP)

Good luck whatever direction you go.