I'm using a gate on a snare drum to stop bleed, but there is a part where the snare is played very softly and does not go over the threshold to open the gate. Can I use automation to just turn the gate off for a few bars and then do the same to turn it back on when the quite part is over? I'd also like to do this on/off thing for delay throws on vocal places as well.

Hi. You can do this with the Nomad Factory gate, but as far as I can tell, not with the Sonitus gate.
If using the Sonitus, you could automate the threshold.
All the best.

Hi,
 
One option you can do for this is to place the effect you want to automate on a bus, create a send on your track, then automate the send level.  This is what I would do for delay throws.
 
Another option you can use is to clone the track (for example, your snare track), uncheck "Clone Events", take the gate out of the cloned track, and copy over the quiet snare parts to the cloned track.

I think you can wrap the gate effect in a Pro-Channel FX-Chain and animate the FX-Chain enable switch.  You can use this if the gate you are using doesn't let you animate its dry/wet/enable state and you don't want to setup a bus.
 

Thanks for all of the replies. This is exactly the info I was looking for! The people on our forum are just the best 😀

Turns out automating the Pro-Channel FX-Chain enable/disable is broken.  It works (and works well) only if the Pro-Channel is open/visible.  If you close it up, the automation will no longer be applied. 
 
This forum message:
http://forum.cakewalk.com/FindPost/3431205
Seems to indicate that Cakewalk knows about this and is not fixing it by design.  Which is kind of maddening to me.  I'm very disappointed in Cakewalk on this.

Ouch.
msorrels thanks for posting that. I was going to try doing it that way first.