We present a generic cavity quantum electrodynamics (QED) set-up that can generate different types of strong multipartite entanglement. The proposed system is already accessible at the experimental level in different cavity QED architectures as it only involves a spin ensemble weakly coupled to a two-photon driven cavity. The first entangling scheme we propose, the dark-mode assisted protocol (DMAP), consists in transferring the squeezing from the cavity to the spin ensemble. The resulting spin squeezed state (with a Kitawaga spin squeezing parameter on the order of 10−2) has strong pairwise entanglement that is especially useful for quantum metrology. In a relatively short timescale (inversely proportional to the collective coupling streng...