Brian,
Maybe I didn't understand your question correctly, but let me have a try here :
Whn you talk about template, I suppose you mean the styling of the content rather than the layout our the screen build-up. Anyway, it seems to me that you need a template (for layout) and a style sheet (where you can define formatting etcetera).
Then, as a second independent part, you would want to just type content. This content you can format in two ways :
1 - directly (with our without wysiwyg editor) by using bold, italic, fonts, sizes, colors, ... [these will actually be present in your content as HTML tags]
2 - indirectly, by refering to the style sheet mentioned above, and by selecting a style type for every piece of content you use/create/edit.
This can be done in Mambo, as a matter of fact, this is how Mambo works with styles.
I hope this helps you out, if not, shoot!
Se7eN
