developing a site in drupal made a mess in modules .. is there better way? When I develop a site in Drupal, I test a couple of modules to see what best suits my needs. The problem is that, if it is a large site, I find myself with a lot of modules and patches (disabled / uninstalled), which still exist in the modules folder. There are a lot of modules that don't have an uninstall feature; the result is that I get many unused tables in the database, and many used files to delete. 

Is there a better solution, or way to proceed for testing modules?
You can of course create a test site to experiment with certain modules and patches before adding them to the real site.

Version control is also really helpful, because it allows you to revert to a previous version of your code. However you need to keep in mind that your database is not under version control, so you need to take a snapshot of that as well to do a proper rollback.

A more advanced solution is to use drush make and the features module. The features module allows you to store a lot of configuration in code. When combined with drush make, it allows you to roll out a fresh copy of your code again and again.