DWM Teething Issues: Window layouts and Titlebar reconfiguration

Question

I just need a couple of pointers in the right direction.
I have switched to DWM from Awesome and would like to bring a few of conveniences of Awesome over to DWM.
1. Is there a way to make window layouts a little more "dynamic" if you'll pardon the pun?
Mod+t, f, m have no effect on some of the windows on a given tag. For example the tag is set such that the window starts in floating mode. Now I can't maximize it.
Another example, if a window is floating I can maximize it (Mod+m) but then Mod+{t,f} won't return it back to the shape it was in previosuly. The window remains maximized.
2. Is there a way to change the length of the title/tag bar and make it half as long? I plan to fill in the rest of the space with Conky.
Or what can be suggested to use up that extra space at the top?

Answer 1

3. Is there a way to toggle between show/hide all windows in a tag? So that when the windows are hidden the desktop gets exposed.
No. Since you're willing to accept a paradigm shift, the first (and maybe hardest) thing every new dwm user needs to learn is that tags are not workspaces. Awesome users seem to use tags as regular workspaces (I know I sure did ); I'm not really sure how that arose or why it's never been corrected, but trust me, using tags the "right" way is so much better.
If you just like being able to see your wallpaper every now and again, there are two ways you might do that. First, you could use the emptyview patch. This would also work well if you have, say, conky running on the root window and want to periodically check some info. The second method (which I use) is to use a screen locker like i3lock or xscreensaver to display an image when the screen locks. When you're actually working with a tiling window manager you won't be able to see your wallpaper anyway.
4. I was also searching for a way to automatically switch to another tag when an app gets run on said tag.
See "Tags Are Not Workspaces," above. There are definitely times when it's best to work with a single window in a view, but I don't like it when applications grab focus from me, so I'm not sure how you might get that to work. In any case, if you're launching a terminal window or some such and just need to view a window's contents for a minute or two, toggling the tag into view should suffice.