empire
Empire
Paste your YouTube channel. Empire builds your video site.
Empire is a Drupal CMS site template that turns a YouTube channel into a streaming-style video site — a cinematic homepage, browsable collections, and editable video pages — without the site owner needing to understand Drupal.
What you get
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A hero billboard, Latest row, and collection rails on the homepage.
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A video page for every imported video, with the YouTube player embedded via consent-aware oEmbed.
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Editorial control: change titles, write descriptions, upload custom artwork (which overrides the YouTube thumbnail), organize videos into collections, and feature videos — none of which is overwritten when new videos import.
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Audience capture: contact form and newsletter signup.
The three packages
Package Type Ownsdrupal/empire
drupal-recipe
Content model, Feeds feed types, Views, default content, roles, docs
drupal/empire_theme
theme
SDC components, view modes, design tokens, Canvas registration
drupal/empire_tools
module
Onboarding + homepage layout: channel resolver, feed provisioning, import orchestration, dashboard, Canvas homepage composition (HomepageBuilder)
Install
Empire composes the drupal_cms_site_template_base baseline, so applying the recipe on a minimal site builds everything. Under DDEV, drush runs from the docroot, so pass the absolute in-container path to the recipe:
ddev drush recipe /var/www/html/recipes/empire ddev drush cache:rebuild
This applies the baseline, installs the theme + tools, builds the content model and Views, and composes the homepage. (See docs/setup.md for the from-zero clean install.)
Empire isn't on drupal.org yet, so it installs from source — copy the three directories into your site and apply the recipe by path (above). Once the packages are published, composer require drupal/empire + drush recipe empire will work with no code change; see docs/PUBLISHING.md for the maintainer publishing plan.
Use it
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Go to
/admin/empire/setup. -
Paste your channel — an
@handle, a channel URL, aUC…ID, or a feed URL. -
Click Build my site. Empire resolves the channel, provisions the feeds, imports recent videos, and you are done.
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Manage everything from the
/admin/empiredashboard.
Documentation
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docs/setup.md— setup, importing, curating videos, privacy & consent, troubleshooting -
docs/architecture.md— how and why it is built this way