So theres the argument of Panels vs Display Suite. Display Suite is awesome and can make your life very easy, but what if you want to control every aspect of the site via Drupal including the main layout and not use a tpl file?

Using Panels Everywhere and Panelizer is great for this and has also been used on many other big Drupal websites.

In this session I'll go into depth about how to make a site in minutes using Panels Everywhere and then move into setting out different content layouts for different entity types using Panelizer finally I'll move into how easy it is to deploy using features and drush.

Modules used:

Panels
Panelizer
Ctools (dependency)
Panels Everywhere