What about having an extra stylesheet under /cms/css/ called extraStyles.css or something, and have SS detect that that stylesheet is there, and parse through it, then populate a dropdown field in the cms editor with the styles that are in that stylesheet. This way a site designer could specify specific styles that the user can apply to text, images etc etc.

I think it would be best to wrap a span around the selected text/element and apply the style to that element.

<span class="backLink"></span>

Any ideas when/if this will be done? I'm having the same issue with a client and believe me, even limiting the choices to h1, h2, etc. users will still find a way to muck up the site. One of my sites had multiple styles applied to oblivion. In that particular case, the client simply wanted blue font and was trying everything to figure out how to get it.

It's better to give just a bit more flexibility, I mean it's supposed to be a help not a hinderance to productivity.

I will probably wind up moving to WordPress if it doesn't look like there will be an addition in the near future. I hate to do it, I think SS is an awesome product....but I can't have unhappy clients either :(

I forgot to say that I do like the idea of being able to add styles and/or color picker.

I think my client would have been happy with just a color picker.

I strongly agree that content should be separate from presentation, which is one of the many things I love about SilverStripe. That being said, it would be sweet to be able to apply your pre-defined typographic CSS styling through the CMS. This way the integrity of the design does not get damaged, and the user still has some control over what styles they can apply to their content. I suppose even then someone could still really screw up the designs we spend so much time creating; however, you could always provide typographic-guidelines for clients to follow when updating or adding their own content. Anyhow, just my thoughts.
I hope something comes of this.

Sean, you're right but in the newsletter section you are far better to use brute force to set fonts, sizes and colours as not all email clients allow the use of styles.

Sorry to bump but this topic has caused me to lose hours as I try to find a solution.

ok, I lost the battle to get fonts and we've had to go with phpLists to get the newsletter ready in time...
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but I now need to be able to apply a class to paragraphs so that there can be subtle differences. All still just p tags but with a class attached.
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Any way I can do that?

No sadly. Unless you use the HTML Source and add the class manually. Short Coming of the current TinyMCE setup. Tho some of the guys got excited about the latest release of TinyMCE3 and using that in the CMS for 2.3 so you never know :)

Willr, this sounds to good to be true. I have tried to install a full version of TinyMCE on my own Silverstripe site, but it wasn`t working out at the end.
For those who admin the sites on their own, it should be possible to push a button to "unleash the power" of the full TinyMCE.

At the moment I am using the workaround that allowes me to use HTML code inside the editing fields.