Different style when listing nodes and displaying a single node I'm new at Drupal, coming from the PHP framework world, and I'm having some problems understanding the the template hierarchy in Drupal 7.

I've created a template called 'node--article.tpl.php' and can style my single article nodes. The problem is that this affects the front page as well. I want to style the node list different then when displaying single nodes. How can I do this?
Berdir's suggestion (coolest imho):


  you can even provide custom template suggestions based on the view mode. See for example drupal.org/node/223440 and bri-space.com/content/creating-drupal-template-suggestions


Also within node-article.tpl.php you can inspect $view_mode and decide what to do. You could either include the logic of both templates in the one file, or create different templates and include the appropriate one based on the value of $view_mode

You might also find Display suite interesting.