drupal 7 orphaned data cleanup

I've been working on a drupal site. During the course of editing it i've added data, removed fields, made new fields, removed data, and added more data. Now the site is almost ready to go- but I feel like th开发者_JAVA技巧e database is very messy (with revisions to fields, etc)

How can I best clean-up my site before the official roll out? Also, what are good practices to use while adding/deleting fields so I dont run into this?

This is a workflow related problem. user491844 mentioned the usage of Features and @luksak told it's not a real answer, but I would like to explain why the usage of Features would be actually one kind of a solution to this.

Normally we do multi-stage development, meaning that you should have a separate environment for development and for production (at least; often a third area called staging is used for acceptance tests etc.: development → staging → production). This means you should try new things on the development environment and whenever satisfied with the result, move it one level upwards. This can be done in multiple ways, one possible answer is Features. In general, you should take a look on how code-drive development can be done.

It's very easy to see why this approach would actually solve your problem: in production, you wouldn't have to clean up things often, because it wouldn't have any extra cruft that a sandbox often has. It also adds a layer of protection: if you break the sandbox, you can just clone the production site and you're good to go. Using Features with added version control (probably Git) also provide a fine way to keep things in a safe place, allows documenting what's happening and makes re-using the different segments of your site possible - which is going to be a very good thing later if you're building multiple sites.

If you have a complete site, it's possible to "Featurize" it, but you will have to be very careful on how you build up the features. In general, try to build small features which only contain components related to a given functionality. You will end up with a lot of small features this way, but it makes handling dependencies easier. You can find a lot of articles on how to split up your features properly: like this and this. Good organization is essential.

One thing I would also mention: in production, you will probably want to keep the site as lean as possible, so setting up caching, disabling development stuff and UI components of some modules etc. might be useful. You can find several useful modules which can help you in production, one of those is Production check.

There are a lot of articles on this "how to move to production" topic that you should research to see the recommended steps, see this for an example.