How to display a field before the title when the title was printed before the node template?
page.tpl.php has a $node variable on all node/%nid pages. So you have two options:


You can use it directly in page.tpl.php (with the help of the field_get_items() and field_view_field() functions).
You can do your messing around with $variables['node'] in a THEME_preprocess_page() function in your theme's template.php, then add your complete data to $variables[] to print the final value in page.tpl.php.


This may also help: Setting up variables in preprocess functions