Small issues - please help?

[Jammet]

I've been running a small server for a while now, and I was wondering if there if anyone could tell me how to make things better.

At the moment all these animals gravitate towards water and .. stay in water bodies forever. Is there a simple script that I could use so that all these -normal- animals like cow, sheep, chicks and wolf do not step on water anymore? Avoid it?

I've noticed that sometimes animals switch species to wolf on my server.

Grass does not grow. Dirt doesn't "turn green". Can that be fixed with a grass growth script somehow?

Item frames seem to always be misplaced when the server starts anew.

Paintings seem to disappear.

What I really care most about is the grass not growing. Places start to look very barren when you try clean a place up to build something.

Please help me?