Im sure most people reading this will have experienced being logged out of a Joomla site. Its a great piece of security that gets built into the core but it can be incredibly frustrating if you are prone to losing track of time, getting distracted or you just take your time while writing an article, creating a support ticket or a responding to a forum post.

This little tip should hopefully restore some sanity and while it doesnt always work its certainly helped me recover some well thought out prose that I thought I could never rewrite after being unceremoniously logged out of the Joomlabamboo back end.

The tip is a simple one and basically involves using the back button in your browser. In most cases we are taught not to use the back button in Joomla because it can create session issues and locks on content items but in this case its the back button that will restore your sanity.

If the item you are writing into is a form that gets submitted or a content item that gets applied, then the browser will actually store that information despite the fact that you havent clicked submit. The key is that you do not ever click refresh.

So picture this scenario ...

You are in the Joomla admin and have just finished writing the blog post of the century, time passes and after clicking save you are prompted with the login screen. Rather than quitting the browser, swearing and walking away from the computer screen try this:

1. Log back in to the site

2. Once logged in, click back a few times until you get to the page where you were adding the information.

3. And tada - the information should be sitting there waiting to be saved to the spectacular blog post that you thought only seconds ago you had lost.

This isnt a guaranteed cure all but it will work if you are adding information in the Joomla admin, a post on a forum or even a contact form on a site (not that you ever get locked out of those).

You could of course circumvent the need for this kind of trick by extending the session time on your site in the site's global configuration, or by using our Crisp Joomla admin template that has a built in timer that triggers an alert when its time to refresh your page. But for cases where you are on a Joomla site that you do not own or have control over and get locked out of, then this may well save the day for you.