When to use custom nodes? How to display custom fields? I am a newbie to Drupal.
I have a custom content type blog_post, with some custom fields, like subtitle.

I have the following two divs, which I want to render for this blog_post like that:

+--------------+--------------------------------+
| 9 Sept 2013  | Good weather on the West coast |
|    2013      |           (title)              |
|   (date)     | Winds are blowing hard in NY   |
|              |          (subtitle)            |
|              | According to the Department... |
|              |          (content)             |
+ -------------+--------------------------------+


My solution: amend node.tpl.php like that:

&lt;aside&gt;
    &lt;?php print $date; ?&gt;
&lt;/aside&gt;
&lt;article&gt;
  &lt;a href="&lt;?php print $node_url;?&gt;"&gt;
    &lt;?php print $title; ?&gt;&lt;br /&gt;
    &lt;?php print $subtitle; ?&gt;
  &lt;/a&gt;
  &lt;?php print render($content); ?&gt;
&lt;/article&gt;


How do I pull $subtitle from the database? Best way I found so far, looks somewhat ugly:

&lt;?php
  print $field_subtitle[LANGUAGE_NONE][0]['value'];
?&gt;
Best suggestion, don't start doing custom template overrides. With site building tools like Display Suite, you no longer have to continue writing custom node templates. By using Display Suite, you can set a view mode you defined to a two-column template, and then set the fields you'd like into each region.

You can see in the example below how easy it is to achieve something like this without having to build custom templates. Of course if you need to do anything extra, you can always customize on top of that.