In what is quickly becoming my extensive experience with Joomla, I have found the single most irritating aspect of the system to be the session time out when using the Administration panel. This time limit can be changed through your global settings, but if you're like me and you work in a world of policies and regulations, you may not have the proper clearance to change this setting.

In my case, while I have full access to change this setting in my Joomla installation, I lack these permissions on paper. Meaning that by company policy, I am not allowed to change the session time out parameters. That task is reserved for the SysAdmin.

As such, my Administrator login expires after 15 minutes of inactivity.

I spend much of my time in windows other than my Joomla Administration panel - be it in Notepad++ modifying code directly or in Word making changes to text copy or in Gimp or Photoshop working kinks out of the graphics or in Toad for MySQL making manual edits to the database (or on a phone call or a bathroom break or any number of other random inconveniences throughout the day). And in each of these instances, the Joomla system logs me out every 15 minutes... and it annoys me to no end.

If you have found yourself in a similar situation, there is an easy solution. The Joomla Administration panel will not log you out if you are editing a template. So, each time I open my Admin panel, I first go to Template Manager -> Templates -> *select template* -> Edit main page template. I minimize this window and open a new window to the Joomla Administration panel. As long as the Template Manager: Edit File screen remains open, the Administration system will not end your session and you won't find yourself having to re-enter your login information every 25 minutes.

Happy Joomlaing!