flexinode: I would like to have a linked thumbnail as teaser

Hello there. Let me start by saying I'm very impressed by the possibilities of Drupal, but (maybe because of that) also quite confused. I would like to make a website-with-CMS for a client, so that she can add & edit content in an easy way, WITHOUT having a cluttered non-compliant output, without unnecessary modules, and without having to install files totalling 30+MB before getting anywhere. For this, Drupal seems to provide the best solution, thanks everyone behind Drupal!

I installed the flexinode-module and it looks like Drupal + flexinode = going to make my life a whole lot easier!

But, here is my problem: I created a custom content type with flexinode, which contains (next to a title) 2 image fields (one for a thumbnail and one for a bigger image) and some textfields & text areas. In the teaser, I want the thumbnail to be the only visible field and I want it to link to the full article.

So I figured that by creating a php template (called 'node-flexinode-1.tpl.php') I could change the default setting

<a href="/<?php print $node_url ?>" title="<?php print $title ?>"><?php print $title ?></a>

to

<a href="/<?php print $node_url ?>" title="<?php print $title ?>"><?php print $image ?></a>.

That didn't work. I also tried

<a href="/<?php print $node_url ?>" title="<?php print $title ?>"><?php print $flexinode-image-1 ?></a>

($flexinode-image-1 points to the thumbnail) and that results in a nice link ('-1') to the whole article, so that doesn't do it either. Let me emphasize that this is the short version of what I tried.

I am quite new to Drupal, and because it consists of so many different files/modules/functions & all, I am unsure where to look and what to do to fix this to my likings... I would really, really appreciate some help on this!