Yes, there definitely is. When I first needed to (learn to) do the same thing, I was a little worried I would need to brush up on mysql commmands. Then I found that there was a layer of abstration that WordPress introduced to make it easier to write to the DB – something like the $wpdb class (in PHP) that gave easy access to the DB.
Then I discovered that they made it even easier for reading/writing/saving plugin preferences to the WPDB without even needing to use objects/classes/etc. Just a simple function, get_option(), retrieves options from the WP DB that you wrote with update_option(). The format is pretty much a simple name-value pair.
As you learn about and play with these functions, here are 3 tips for good implementation:
1) update_option() is great for both adding a new option, and updating one – usually no need to bother with the add_option() function at all.
2) Instead of writing many options to the DB for all of your plugin’s settings, store all of your settings in 1 array, then store that 1 array as 1 simple option in the WP DB.
3) When your plugin is uninstalled/deleted, run delete_option() to remove the option(s) from the WP DB.
-WCC
