Best Drupal layout techniques

Question

• playing with template files tpl.php
• Panels
• Fusion + Skinr
• Display Suite

How do You define the layout of Your Drupal sites? Which techniques do You find most useful?

I'm quite old-school and stick to templating. It's true that I haven't practices the others too much. Yet, I'm also afraid that HTML output from Panels, Fusion or other fancy helpers would be twice as big as reasonably customised Zen. Such techniques, however, probably reduce development time.

What do You think about these "clickable" solutions?

Answer 1

When you talk about Panels and Context which you didn't mention, they are much more than simple clicky layout tools. They can be used as such, but if you only want to setup layout you shouldn't use those two. That is not what they are meant for. These modules are used to create rules for how and what to display given the context of something, fx a node, a term or something else.