A flexible front page layout tool I want to build a front page in which the site administrator has a lot of control (through the UI) over the layout. Panels is the only thing that comes close, but I still don't think it can do everything I need (and admittedly, I'm not a big fan of panels).

requirements

The front page will have a couple of sections; I'll call them "news", "products" and "store" in this example. The administrator must be able to control the order of the sections on the page.

Each section will contain a selection of news nodes for the news section and a selection of products for the products section. (The nodequeue module would be an obvious choice here.) The order of the nodes can be controlled by the administrator too. Also, the admin must be able to choose if a node is rendered full width, or if two are rendered half width, placing them side-by-side.

The "store" section must contain a maximum of 4 blocks (not nodes). The admin must be able to make a selection out of 6 or 7 blocks and gain control the order.

question

I'm sure I can make this work all by myself, but I'm curious: Which module (or combination of modules, if any) would you use to accomplish this? Needless to say, I would like this to be as easy and user friendly as possible, preferrably with as least different forms and interfaces as possible.
EDIT:
I realize there is a more generic question here, so I copied my answer over there.

A combination of the following modules can get you quite far:


Display suite
Block reference
Entity reference
Field collection
Bean
Inline Entity Form
Multiple Selects


How?


Create a node type "frontpage".
Add a multiple-value block reference field with "Multiple Selects list" widget.
Set up some bean types to allow different kinds of fancy boxes that can be placed on the frontpage.
In addition you can have Views blocks to be used in the block reference.
One of the bean types could have a multiple-value entityreference to e.g. reference a bunch of products (and have them sortable). I generally prefer this over nodequeue.
Use Display suite to define how each bean and the frontpage itself should be displayed.
Use Display suite custom field templates to have decorated boxes around each bean/block in the blockreference, or each product, etc. Check hook_ds_field_theme_functions_info(). This stuff is powerful and awesome!
Tell the client / content editor to use the contextual links to edit individual beans.


This should give you some material to play with ..
More detailed questions should be discussed in dedicated stackexchange questions, since this is quite broad.