Features

The full feature list, grouped by area. Linked words open the in-depth guide.

• Consent management
  • YouTube stays blocked until the visitor makes an explicit choice
    • No video iframe, player script or YouTube cookie reaches the browser until the visitor clicks Accept
    • Exception 1, if you turn on geo-detection: visitors outside your consent regions are auto-accepted by default, and you can change this
    • Exception 2, only if you choose it: the YouTube thumbnail placeholder mode loads poster images from img.youtube.com before consent
  • Accept/decline dialog with clear, customizable messaging
  • CSRF-protected form submission prevents replay attacks
  • Secure cookies with HttpOnly, Secure and SameSite flags
  • Consent state remembered across visits through a configurable cookie lifetime
• YouTube detection
  • Seven built-in patterns, applied to the finished page HTML
    • Standard youtube.com/embed iframes
    • Privacy-enhanced youtube-nocookie.com/embed iframes
    • The YouTube IFrame API script (youtube.com/iframe_api)
    • HTML-entity-encoded iframes from page builders
    • Smart Slider 3 YouTube video layers
    • The YouTube Gallery component's player script
    • TinyMCE/JCE oEmbed youtu.be links
  • Custom Regex Pattern for video widgets the built-in patterns miss
  • Works on any Joomla page: articles, modules, custom HTML and third-party extensions, without template editing
• Inline placeholders
  • Position 5, Inline (replace video), puts a click-to-load card in each video's place
  • Configurable placeholder width (%) and height (px)
  • Four placeholder image choices
    • Icon only (privacy-safe), the default
    • Single custom image for every video
    • Per-video custom images: map a video ID, or a pasted YouTube URL, to its own poster
    • YouTube thumbnail, opt-in, which contacts Google before consent
  • Play button styles: none, light, dark or red (YouTube-style)
  • Player scripts such as the IFrame API are removed without leaving an empty box
• Themes and custom colors
  • Five built-in color themes designed to blend with any site
    • Clean: white and green
    • Midnight: navy and amber
    • Forest: emerald and coral
    • Slate: gray and blue
    • Warm: cream and teal
  • Custom color mode with 12 color fields
    • Background, text, accept button and decline button colors
    • Set independently for light and dark mode
    • Applied to the consent box and to every inline placeholder
• Dark mode
  • Automatic OS-level detection through prefers-color-scheme
  • Force light or force dark, regardless of the visitor's setting
  • Separate dark mode colors for the custom theme
• Positions
  • Center modal: overlay dialog centered on screen
  • Bottom bar: full-width bar fixed to the bottom
  • Bottom-right and bottom-left: compact boxes in the lower corners
  • Inline: a placeholder in place of each video
  • All positions are responsive and adapt to mobile screens
• Animations
  • Fade in down, fade in up, fade in left and fade in right for the overlay positions
  • With prefers-reduced-motion enabled, the dialog appears instantly without animation
• Geo-detection
  • Shows the consent dialog only to visitors who need it
  • Uses the browser's Accept-Language header to detect EU, EEA and UK languages
    • No external API calls, no latency and no third-party dependencies
  • Configurable behavior for other visitors: auto-agree, show the consent box, or skip the plugin
  • Detects language, not location
• Accessibility (WCAG 2.1 AA)
  • The center modal keeps keyboard focus inside the dialog while it is open; the bar and corner boxes leave focus on the page
  • Full keyboard navigation (Tab, Shift+Tab, Enter, Space); Escape moves focus to the close button
  • Screen reader support with ARIA roles, labels and a live region
  • Reduced motion support
  • Scroll position is kept across the consent reload
• Security
  • Cookie flags
    • HttpOnly: not accessible through JavaScript
    • Secure: when Force HTTPS is set to Entire Site, the cookie is only sent over HTTPS
    • SameSite=Lax: the cookie is not sent with cross-site requests
  • CSRF tokens: form submissions are validated with Joomla's token system
  • Input escaping: all configurable text is escaped before rendering
  • Debug output is shown to logged-in Super Users only
• Cookie control
  • Session mode: consent expires when the browser closes
  • Days mode: any value from 1 to 365 days
• Customizable content
  • Title icon (any icon class), custom title and custom consent text
  • Privacy policy page link
• Expert and debug tools
  • Custom Regex Pattern applied alongside the built-in patterns; a broken pattern fails silently instead of breaking the page
  • Debug Mode lists which patterns matched on the page, visible to Super Users only
• Demo mode
  • Shows the consent banner with a "Demo" badge, without blocking videos or saving the visitor's choice
  • Restrict the demo to a single page with Show on Page
• Multilingual
  • Ships with 23 languages: English, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, Dutch, Swedish, Danish, Finnish, Norwegian, Estonian, Polish, Czech, Slovak, Hungarian, Slovenian, Croatian, Bulgarian, Greek, Latvian and Lithuanian
  • Add any language with a standard Joomla .ini language file
• Joomla integration
  • Built for Joomla 4.4, 5 and 6 with no deprecated APIs
  • WebAssetManager, dependency injection through services/provider.php, and SubscriberInterface events
  • Runs only on front-end HTML pages, never in the administrator, API or feeds
  • The installer refuses PHP older than 8.1 or Joomla older than 4.4 with a readable message
  • Namespace: Joomla\Plugin\System\SmartLocalYoutube\Extension