As long as the article is published and it's publish up date was reached it should appear in the article would Joomla fires the content save event. Unpublished articles or articles where their publish up date hasn't been reached won't be added to the stream. Note you can make your own activity logging behavior with CB Auto Actions so if you need it to log unpublished articles it's possible to do so using CB Auto Actions.

You can't, that's styling specifically built into CB Activity. I assume you're referring to CB GroupJive Photos integration? You shouldn't need CB GroupJive Photos, Files, or Videos integrations anymore. They are completely replaced by CB Gallery integration with groups. To have CB Gallery within groups simply install CB Auto Actions then on the System Actions page publish "CB Groupjive - Gallery" and you'll now have a regular CB Gallery for each group.