I would suggest reading up on Sling Request processing - http://dev.day.com/docs/en/cq/current/developing/the_basics.html#Sling Request Processing. The easiest way to get back a rendition of a node is to make sure the node you are trying to access has a sling resource type. Then you can associate sc...

I don't know how well Drive will integrate with CQ 5.4. Drive uses WebDAV to interface to CQ, the CQ 5.4 documentation for the WebDAV interface does not mention drive support (https://dev.day.com/docs/en/cq/5-4/dam/using_cq5_dam_increativeproduction.html#Uploading a Digital Asset Using WebDAV). In a...

When you say it didn't work how did it fail? Did it not produce anything or did it produce the wrong things. Have you looked at this blog post? http://www.wemblog.com/2012/02/how-to-use-static-agent-in-cq-wem.html. 

Typically you would not use a drop down for that functionality, but rather a pathfield widget (which is what Justin mentions in his comment). The path field widget is used to select pages from the repository and stores the path to the page in the component's content.

In 5.6.1 there are out of the box workflow process steps for locking and unlocking the payload of a workflow. They aren't listed in the documentation, and I have never used them so I can't speak to any pitfalls in their use, but it is probably good first step before coding anything. You can put the ...

I don't know of anyway to do that doesn't at least involve overriding the dialog file for the image component in /apps. By overriding the dialog in /apps/foundation/components/image you could disable the free crop, and then you use a hidden x-type to set the crop dimensions. One thing to consider ab...

The to two different methods impact different content. So let's walk through and example with two paths:/content/mysite/en/products/content/mysite/en/servicesLet's say that you activate /content/mysite/en/products. The content update logic from dispatcher will for example remove /content/mysite/en/p...

The client library functionality does not support that sort of dynamic generation to my knowledge. 

Which version of CQ are you running, and which files are you seeing loaded from /libs? In 5.6 the only reference to /libs that I know of in publish mode (as opposed to author mode where there will always be a bunch of stuff referenced from /libs) is the stats tracker JS - /libs/wcm/stats/tracker.js....

That's because it doesn't have a design mode dialog. Not all components have design dialogs. Is there something your were expecting to be able to configure in design mode for it?