Smart Local YouTube removes every YouTube embed from your Joomla pages until the visitor clicks Load YouTube. Until then no video iframe loads, no player script runs, no YouTube cookie is set and no request reaches Google, and that includes privacy-enhanced youtube-nocookie.com embeds.

In place of the videos it shows a consent box in one of four positions, or an inline click-to-load placeholder in each video's own spot, with your own poster image and a play button. Seven built-in patterns find YouTube in standard iframes, page builders, sliders, gallery components and oEmbed links, and your own regex covers anything else. It runs entirely on your server: no third-party consent service, no external API, no account.

🎯 Use cases

• 🇪🇺 Sites with EU visitors: embed YouTube under GDPR, with consent collected before anything loads.
• 🎬 Video-heavy pages: tutorials, product tours and video libraries keep their layout, with one placeholder per video.
• 🧱 Page builders and sliders: block videos added through builders, Smart Slider 3 or the YouTube Gallery component, without editing them.
• 🏢 Agencies handing over sites: a compliant video setup that clients restyle themselves, with no per-site SaaS fee.
• 🔁 Replacing a heavy CMP: drop a third-party consent platform that loads its own scripts.
• 🌍 Global audiences: ask EU, EEA and UK visitors, and decide what everyone else gets.

💡 Benefits

• 🔒 Nothing loads before consent: the YouTube code is removed from the page output, so there is no window where Google is contacted first.
• 🖼️ Placeholders that look intentional: an icon, one image for every video or one per video, instead of an empty gap.
• 🏠 Nothing leaves your server: no consent service, no IP geolocation, no runtime calls to anyone else.
• 🎨 Fits your design: five themes with dark variants, four positions plus inline, four animations and custom colours.
• ♿ Usable by everyone: WCAG 2.1 AA, with keyboard support, ARIA semantics and reduced-motion support.
• 🔧 No code required: position, theme, images, texts, cookie lifetime and regions are all set in the Joomla plugin screen.
• 🆓 Open source and upgrade-safe: GPL v2 or later, updated through Joomla's own update system.

🧩 Features

🍪 Cookie Consent

Consent collection with safe defaults and no third-party service.
- Accept & decline: equally prominent buttons on every consent box
- Cookie lifetime: session-based, or persistent from 1 to 365 days
- Privacy policy link: pick any Joomla menu item and the box links to it
- Secure cookies: HttpOnly and SameSite=Lax, plus Secure when Force HTTPS covers the entire site
- CSRF protection: Joomla's session token on every consent submission

▶️ YouTube Detection

Catches YouTube wherever it is in your pages.
- 7 built-in patterns: standard iframes, youtube-nocookie.com iframes, the IFrame API script, entity-encoded iframes, Smart Slider 3 video layers, the YouTube Gallery component and oEmbed links
- Custom regex: add your own pattern for video widgets the built-ins don't know
- Debug view: lists which patterns matched and how often, shown to Super Users only
- Non-destructive: YouTube code is removed from the page output only; your content is never changed

🖼️ Placeholders & Poster Images

Each blocked video becomes a click-to-load card.
- Inline placeholders: one card per video, in its own spot, with the width and height you choose
- Four image modes: icon only (the default), one custom image for all videos, per-video images, or the YouTube thumbnail
- Per-video mapping: assign a poster image per video by video ID or by its YouTube URL
- Play buttons: none, light, dark or red over the poster
- Privacy note: the YouTube thumbnail mode is opt-in, because it loads images from Google before consent; the other modes use images from your own site

🎨 Design & Themes

• 4 positions plus inline: centre modal, full-width bottom bar, bottom-right or bottom-left corner, or inline in place of each video
• 5 colour themes: Clean, Midnight, Forest, Slate and Warm, each with a dark palette
• Custom colours: background, text and buttons for light and dark mode, applied to the box and the placeholders
• 4 animations: fade in down, up, left or right
• Custom title, text & icon: without editing language files

🌙 Dark Mode

• Auto: follows the visitor's system setting via prefers-color-scheme
• Forced: always light or always dark
• Custom dark palette: separate dark colours for the custom theme

🌍 Geo-Detection

Ask only where the law requires it.
- Browser-language detection: reads the Accept-Language header; no IP lookup, no external API
- EU, EEA & UK: toggle each region on or off
- 3 options for everyone else: auto-agree, show the consent box anyway, or skip the plugin
- Safe default: visitors without a language header always see the consent box

♿ Accessibility

WCAG 2.1 AA.
- Keyboard: Tab, Shift+Tab, Enter and Space; Escape moves focus to the close button
- Focus trap: in the centre modal only; bar and corner boxes leave focus on the page
- Screen readers: ARIA dialog role, labels and a live region
- Reduced motion: animations off when the visitor asks for it
- Scroll position kept: the page returns to where the visitor was after consent

🛠️ Developer

Modern Joomla architecture with no deprecated APIs.
- Event subscriber plugin: SubscriberInterface with dependency injection through services/provider.php
- WebAssetManager: all assets registered in joomla.asset.json
- Installer checks: refuses PHP older than 8.1 or Joomla older than 4.4 with a readable message, before anything changes
- 23 languages: all the EU/EEA languages that need consent banners; add others with standard .ini files
- Joomla 4.4, 5 & 6: PHP 8.1 or higher

🔗 Resources

📚Documentation - https://nextsoftware.dev/documentation/smart-local-youtube
🛒Product page - https://nextsoftware.dev/joomla-extensions/smart-local-youtube
▶️Live demo - https://demo.nextsoftware.dev/demo-plugins/smart-local-youtube