The architecture of Patterns has been extended in a new major release (7.x-2.x) and due to these big changes backwards compatibility with Patterns created with versions 7.x-1.x is not supported (some Patterns might be marked as non syntactically valid). Further details for the changes in the syntax and the status of the automatic extraction can be found in the Tour of the components section.
Syntactic and semantic validation
The new version of Patterns allows the components to implement two separated layers of syntactic and semantic validation, providing a very valuable feedback to the user that is going to run a pattern in case it is necessary to solve any possible conflicts.
Improvement of the export functions and components extension
Patterns 7.x-2.x includes a set of enhancements to export automatically the configuration of a site. All the main components possess now automatic export capabilities, and depending on the type of component new options to export it are offered.
Custom functions as action handlers
Besides form handlers, also custom functions can be specified as action handler. For backward compatibility issues, they still have to accept two input parameters, and the second one actually contains the action data. See the User component for an example.
Patterns Server
The new release of Patterns provides the changes to offer compatibility with the new Patterns Server and Patterns Client modules (to be released soon), whose aim is to act as a hub for sharing Patterns files among Drupal users.
The following subsections provide a detailed description of these new features for Patterns 7.x-2.x. For a quick overview you might find the slides from the Presentation of Patterns at Drupalcamp London 2013 more handy.
