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

• A hero billboard, Latest row, and collection rails on the homepage.

• A video page for every imported video, with the YouTube player embedded via consent-aware oEmbed.

• 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.

• Audience capture: contact form and newsletter signup.

The three packages

Package Type Owns drupal/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

1. Go to /admin/empire/setup.

2. Paste your channel — an @handle, a channel URL, a UC… ID, or a feed URL.

3. Click Build my site. Empire resolves the channel, provisions the feeds, imports recent videos, and you are done.

4. Manage everything from the /admin/empire dashboard.

Documentation

• docs/setup.md — setup, importing, curating videos, privacy & consent, troubleshooting

• docs/architecture.md — how and why it is built this way