Whenever I disable and then re-enable a plugin, it resets the plugin back to all the original settings that I then have to go into lots of templates to change. Is there a way of saving the settings before disable/enable procedure or maybe a way of preventing the plugin from doing a full re-installation to stop this happening?
It makes running upgrades a lot longer as is.
Ta
Instead of deactivating the plugin, you could just comment the code that loads them. I think there's even a define that prevents plugins from being loaded. Or you could just not deactivate them and see if the upgrade works anyway.
It also depends on the plugin... for example my Google SEO plugin has a ton of settings and even a custom database table. If you lost that simply when (temporarily) deactivating a plugin, that'd be horrible. Thus the settings are kept, and only removed when you completely uninstall the plugin.
So if you have a problem with a plugin I'd also talk to the plugin author about it. Usually it's no problem for a plugin author to just move the code that removes the setting, to the (un)install routine instead of the (de)activation routine...
Yeah, it's how the plugin's made. Some plugins have an install/uninstall function as well as an activate/deactivate. Installing/uninstalling will do all the database stuff and deal with adding/deleting the settings, activate/deactivate would just do the template changes, so you could deactivate it, but all the data would stay. If there's just an activate/deactivate function with a plugin, deactivating it would remove everything.