How does this module differ from Panels Everywhere?

My thoughts exactly.

From a technical perspective, PE works by changing the behaviour of the theme layer, Panelator works by altering the menu hooks. This makes Panelator less susceptible to issues arising from custom themes (whilst potentially more susceptible to conflicts with other modules doing menu overrides).

From an end-user perspective, Panelator overrides only the content area of the page (and by default, the left/right sidebars, but this may be disabled). All other regions remain the same. This makes panelator particularly suited to extending an existing site which has a custom theme, with very little configuration required.

(this probably needs better documentation, so I'll leave this ticket open until the documentation has been added).

from what i read, panelator should only apply changes to the $content region.

Isn't that exactly what Panels does in the first place?

Isn't that exactly what Panels does in the first place?

Panelator uses Panels to provide its features.

Panels provides a set of default system pages, which allow you to override URLs such as node/nnn or user/nnn. These system pages provide context which allows panel pages to be embedded, and panels provides a set of system panel-panes, for example, to show the node-body, the publication-date, etc.

The limitation of panels is that you can only use the system pages that it provides, or create your own custom panel panes - you can't embed another module's pages (e.g. forum pages) into panels, without significant dev work.

Panelator can take any page on your site, and embed it in panels. The original page content is made available as a panel-pane.

I'm interested in how this works. I've always wondered if it might be possible to give every page a panel - sort of like using panel_nodes for every page, with defaults if you don't want to overide the page with a panel.

I don't know if anyone's tried community server - but I wrote a blog a while ago about that sort of functionality using panels - does panelator do this? If so, it's different from panels as it currently works.
http://www.maybeor.com/blog/drupal-7ux-panels-widgets-and-community-server (remember it was a while ago).

I do think that with clever defaults (community server does it by menu - parent/child defaults - but I think node overide a more sensible way) but the ability to overide each page should you wish to, panels would really free up layout. At the moment you can overide each page by creating a variant with a selection rule for that node id, but that means you have to go in to node overide panel every time you wish to change it - you can't give authors the permissions to change just the layout of their page etc...

I'll try and test it out, but was wondering if it's aiming in that direction?

you know, you can use Panels + Mini Panels with the option to override node template and blocks to achieve the same thing... right?