README

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

Feeds does the ingestion. Drupal does the content/rendering. Empire Tools makes it feel like a product.

Install

From a Drupal 11.3+ project (Drupal CMS 2.x). Empire composes the Drupal CMS baselines, which pull a few pre-stable dependencies (e.g. webform 6.3-rc, and drupal_cms_site_template_base is dev-only), so Composer must be allowed to resolve them. Set the stability flags once, then require and apply:

composer config minimum-stability dev
composer config prefer-stable true
composer require drupal/empire
drush recipe empire
drush cache:rebuild

minimum-stability: dev + prefer-stable: true is required — without it Composer refuses the baselines' pre-stable deps and the require fails. prefer-stable still prefers stable releases wherever one exists, so only the genuinely pre-stable packages come in pre-stable.

Empire composes the drupal_cms_site_template_base baseline, so applying the recipe on a minimal site builds everything: the baseline, the empire_theme theme + empire_tools module, the content model and Views, and the composed homepage. (See docs/setup.md for the from-zero clean install.)

From source (development)

Working from a clone of the monorepo? Under DDEV drush runs from the docroot, so apply the recipe by its absolute in-container path:

ddev drush recipe /var/www/html/recipes/empire
ddev drush cache:rebuild

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.

Roles & trust

Applying the recipe grants the standard content_editor role the Empire permissions — including configure Empire channel and refresh Empire imports, which make outbound requests to YouTube and create content in bulk (both are flagged restrict-access). For a multi-author or untrusted-editor site, move those two permissions to an admin/site-manager role; see docs/architecture.md for the full trust rationale.

Documentation

• docs/setup.md — setup, importing, curating videos, privacy & consent, troubleshooting
• docs/architecture.md — how and why it is built this way