NodeStream is progressing really fast right now, and we are rushing against a stable release in a very fast pace. In order to keep people up to date on the progress of NodeStream and important changes to the architecture, we decided it would be good to start post a "State of NodeStream" post every week. This is the first "state of NodeStream" post in this group, and if this works well, we will continue to post updates through this channel. If you have been working with something awesome and want to share it, or highlight an issue you have in the queue, please do so in the comments.
Big architectural changes
People have been working with NodeStream for quite some time now, and two big issues has come up during this time. The first is that we are having problems extending NodeStream with things that makes changes to fields, since that almost always makes the core features overridden, and the second is that the media module together with the styles module is quite buggy.
Fields might go out of features for core
We have tried to address the problem with fields in various ways, investigating things like Features Override, custom code and a new approach investigated by the Phase 2 guys described over here. In the end we realized that all these methods might work well for extending distributions but we are building more of a platform for building distributions, which means we need to be even more careful and sometimes sacrifice some convenience in order for our implementors to lead a happy life. To that end, we decided that the most promising approach is probably to remove fields from features for our core features in NodeStream, and make sure they are just installed and then not managed at all by features. In order for this to go as smoothly as possible, we added support for importing fields in the Default config module, our module to manage importing of things not suitable for real configuration management, like roles and permissions. A branch in the NS Core project has been created to reflect on these changes, and there is an issue for it in the NodeStream issue queue over here.
Removal of styles module, upgrading to media 2.0-unstable2
Another problem that people were having was that the styles module is not really the way to go for dealing with view modes for files anymore, since file entity has implemented basicly the same functionality. Another issue we have is that NodeStream was built on top of the media field, which is deprecated now. NodeStream 2 is expected to be supported for the lifetime of Drupal 7, so we decided to change all media fields to file fields. An update hook is provided by core and the work is in the branch 7.x-2.x-upgrade-media. A review is needed for this branch, please chime in over here.
New Theme!
We are working on a new theme. It is called Lucid and work is being done in this sandbox. Lucid will be the default theme for NodeStream when it is done.
NS Business, a company representation product
We have started work on a new product suitable for creating Business presentation websites. It is being worked on here.