So most of us here are Joomla fans while some are Drupal fans. It’s a matter of choice really, they’re both quite good as far as CMS’ go.
But that’s not why I’m writing today.
One of the things that annoys me the most is Joomla’s quick timeout when you’re logged into the administrator back-end. It seems that if you walk away for a few minutes, your Joomla’s timed out and you have to login all over again. It’s especially annoying if you were working on a new article and didn’t save it prior to being logged out. Yup, that means you have to type it all over again.
Well, if you’ve had enough of this nonsense, thankfully, you can change it pretty easily.
1. Go into your Joomla Administrative back-end
2. Click on the GLOBAL CONFIGURATION icon in the lower left of the page or you can use the menu SITE > GLOBAL CONFIGURATION.
3. Click on the SYSTEM tab
4. On the lower right side of the page, look for SESSION SETTINGS
5. Change the MINUTES to however long you want to stay logged in

That’s it, now you can safely go get another cup of coffee without having to worry about re-typing everything all over again.
#1 by leo on September 27th, 2008
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joomla 1.0.x had frontend and backend sessions separated. joomla 1.5.x doesn’t?
i dont want to keep people who are logged into the frontend logged in for a long time.
is there a work-around?
#2 by Tampa SEO on January 30th, 2009
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Excellent! Don’t know why I didn’t know this, but it is very useful when developing a site… can always reduce the time later.
#3 by gery on February 11th, 2009
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yes i too want to have unlimited admin timeout, but i want to keep the frontend timing out, how can we do this?
#4 by Carlos on February 27th, 2009
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Thanks for taking the time to write this up
#5 by Dr Paul on March 4th, 2009
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Thanks for that. Like the other commenter I would also like to know about front/back split but in the meantime – I’m off for a coffee!
#6 by Tim on April 22nd, 2009
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YAY! THANKS!
#7 by Neil on April 27th, 2009
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Thanks for that. Much appreciated!
#8 by Maria on April 29th, 2009
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Thanks for this information. It was really annoying. You could answer a phone call or walk away for 15 minutes and you are logged off.
#9 by Mike Fulton on August 11th, 2009
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Thanks for the info! It was just what I needed.
Ironic, however, that an important tip like this would be found on a WordPress-based site. ;^)
#10 by Sheila on August 18th, 2009
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Thanks! I only wish I had found this before I lost an enormous post!
#11 by Gary Miller on September 9th, 2009
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Yeah, thanks. NOW, can you tell me how to get around Joomla’s requirement that you sign in twice?
#12 by Jeff on November 1st, 2009
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It appears that a setting of zero (0) disables the time-out feature.
#13 by David on November 6th, 2009
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Thank you! I needed to adjust this insanely short timeout! I searched for an answer, and this post was at the top of my results. Congrats for getting this topic listed at the top of my google search!
#14 by same on November 12th, 2009
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thanks it is much needed
#15 by Sashi on December 3rd, 2009
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Thanks for sharing this useful tip.
#16 by chacha on February 23rd, 2010
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thx u
#17 by Slowtarget on April 15th, 2010
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Thanks for the tip. Very useful.
#18 by Cole Tarbet on June 7th, 2010
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Doesn’t work for me. I have changed it and restarted everything. Could be a permission issue…?
#19 by Bryn on June 11th, 2010
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Great tip. Just implemented it