Jess gave you a sneak peek earlier in the month, but now the wait is over—single sign-on has been activated this afternoon, 25/02/13 1:00PM AEDT.

If you didn’t catch the recent Notes post, here’s the news in a nutshell: We’re moving to a centralized system for sign-in and account management, starting with the Marketplaces. This single sign-on will then be extended to other Envato services like Microlancer, announced by Collis last week. It’ll be fewer usernames, passwords and sign-in boxes, and a step towards uniting our Envato sites and services!

What’s the difference?

First things first, your accounts haven’t changed. You’re still able to log in with the same username and password combination as before, on all of the Envato Marketplaces. It just looks a bit different. Our other networks and sites currently still have separate account systems, and the sign-in process there hasn’t changed.

This morning everyone has been logged out of the Marketplaces. We do try to minimise this kind of frustrating interference with your routine, but in this case there’s no easy way around it. When you go to sign in on the Marketplaces you’ll be redirected to the Envato Account Center. Enter your Marketplace credentials and you will then be redirected back to the site you came from. If you want to create a new Envato Account, update your details or recover a lost password or username, you’ll do that through the same external site.

The Marketplaces have new links for updating account settings that direct you to the Account Center when you need it.

What does it look like?

Because it’s a bit different to how the sign-in process used to work, we got Josh from Support to record a screencast taking you through the new Account Center. Take it away, Josh!

While we were here…

We also took this opportunity to add some much-needed improvements, such as:

• Secure login over SSL
• Improved cross-site sign-in — if you’re signed in to ThemeForest, you’re also signed into the other Marketplaces
• Cross-site sign-out — if you sign out of ThemeForest, you’re also signed out of the other Marketplaces

These kinds of structural changes benefit everyone and are really important as Envato and the Marketplaces continue to grow.

Don’t Panic.

While we don’t expect there to be too many issues, we are aware there may be some things that need attention so we will be watching closely for anything that might come up. We have a forum thread active here where updates will be visible. Please check this thread if you are having any issues as we may already know about it and be working on a fix.

Obviously, if you can’t log in you won’t be able to post on the forums. In that case, open a Support Ticket. Make sure you select the ‘Envato Account’ option on the form as we will be keeping a close eye on that queue. Please explain as clearly as you can the issue you are having and what you were trying to do when the problem occurred (we’d love it if you could include URLs, screenshots and step by step explanations too).

That’s all, folks!