Settings are highly unreliable in behaviour

[richard-jones]

I've been getting some odd problems with the settings feature. While replacing the front page of the website today, the following things happened:

• I set the name of the page to "we don't sell products, we trade our skills", I left the author as "test" and updated the content from the /about/front page mockup
• I went to /about/front and did edit->delete
• I got an error message about page not found; the /about/front was successfully deleted
• I went back to the front page which was now editable by default, not visible to external users, had the author set to "richard" and the page title "/", and the search settings had been obliterated (tags:featured, display bottom, etc).
• I was able to revert the settings manually

[markmacgillivray]

closing in reference to #37