Content Guard
Understand content relationships before changes cause broken references. Content Guard gives editors, administrators and agencies dependency intelligence directly inside the Umbraco Backoffice.
Start here¶
What Content Guard protects¶
Content Guard helps teams understand where content is referenced, prevent unsafe deletion and publishing, monitor content health, validate multilingual relationships, and assess downstream impact before making changes.
It is designed for:
- Editors who need confidence before changing, unpublishing, or deleting content
- Administrators responsible for content integrity across large sites
- Agencies managing complex Umbraco implementations with many references
- Multilingual teams that need culture-aware dependency validation
- Developers who want durable dependency information without repeatedly scanning the full content tree
Core features¶
Where Used¶
Shows which content or media items reference the current item, including source name, property context, path, culture/segment, state, and authorization-aware navigation.
Safe Delete¶
Protects referenced content and media from accidental deletion. Supported policies are Warn, Require Confirmation, and Block. Safety decisions fail closed when the dependency index is incomplete or unhealthy.
Publish Guard¶
Detects unhealthy dependencies before publishing, including missing, trashed, unpublished, and culture-specific dependency problems.
Read the Publish Guard guide →
Content Health¶
Provides a centralized view of dependency integrity with status, metrics, paging, filters, and explicit index-health states.
Read the Content Health guide →
Multilingual Validation¶
Validates references across cultures and language fallback behavior, including missing or unpublished cultures and unavailable fallback targets.
Read the Multilingual Validation guide →
Dependency Impact¶
Shows inbound and outbound relationships, bounded dependency depth, and risk classification so editors can understand the likely effect of a change before making it.
Supported reference types¶
- Content Picker
- Media references
- Multi URL Picker internal links
- Rich Text Editor internal links
- Supported nested references inside Block Grid / Block List structures
- Culture-specific reference values
External URLs are not treated as internal content dependencies. Third-party custom property editors require explicit scanner support.
Existing-site bootstrap¶
On first installation, Content Guard creates its durable dependency-index storage and bootstraps existing content automatically. Existing content does not need to be manually re-saved.
dotnet add package UMBFY.Umbraco.ContentGuard
See Installation for the complete setup and verification procedure.
Security and permissions¶
Content Guard respects Umbraco Backoffice permissions. Restricted dependencies may still affect risk and guard decisions without exposing restricted names or details to unauthorized users.
Operations¶
The durable dependency index powers Where Used, Safe Delete, Publish Guard, Content Health, and Impact. Important operational states include Initializing, Rebuilding, Ready, and Unhealthy. When completeness matters, an incomplete index must never be reported as safe or healthy.
See Rebuild Index and Troubleshooting.
Documentation map¶
Screenshots and guided workflows¶
The UMBFY documentation standard treats real Umbraco Backoffice screenshots as part of the product documentation. Feature pages should show the actual UI, then explain the workflow step by step. Screenshot assets are maintained using the shared Screenshot Guide.
Support¶
Use the UMBFY Packages issue forms for bugs, feature requests, and package support. Include the package version and Umbraco version when reporting a problem. Never include passwords, connection strings, API keys, license keys, or other secrets in public issues.