Ditto!
If you have used http://www.blogger.com/ at least once, you know what I mean. If not, let you try, it takes just half minute (go under "template" and then click on "post").
If you don't want to try, I'll explain here :-)
With widgets (see http://codex.wordpress.org/Plugins/WordPress_Widgets) you can easily manage what you like to put on your sidebar, without dealing with PHP. The same should apply to the post (for example where and how you would like to show the date, the time, the category, etc)