Troubleshooting

No birthdays are showing

• Confirm a date profile field exists at Users > Profile Fields, of type Date Selector (datebox) or Birthdate.
• Confirm the widget or shortcode points at that field. In the shortcode, field_name is the numeric field ID, not the field label.
• Confirm members have actually filled in their birthday.
• Check the range: try No Limit while testing.
• Check the display mode: Friends and Followings show nothing to logged-out visitors, and nothing if the viewer has no connections.
• Members whose birthday field visibility is “Only Me”, and members who opted out on Settings > General, are excluded by design.
• The current viewer’s own birthday is never shown to themselves.

The wrong date is showing

• Check Settings > General > Timezone matches your community’s location. Birthdays are calculated in the site timezone.
• Make sure the widget’s Date Format matches how you want the date displayed; it does not change which birthdays match.
• Save the widget (or wait for the cache to expire) after changing profile data, so the cached list refreshes.

Changes are not appearing

• The list is cached for the Cache Duration (default 30 minutes). Save the widget settings to clear the cache immediately, or lower the Cache Duration while testing.
• Profile, friendship, follow, and user changes clear the cache automatically; a manual profile edit that does not fire those hooks may need a widget save.

The send-wishes button is missing

• It only appears when the BuddyPress Messages component is active, the widget’s “Enable option to wish them” is on, and the viewer is logged in. Logged-out visitors never see it.

The Friends or Followings option is missing from the widget

• Friends appears only when the BuddyPress Friends component is active.
• Followings appears only when the BP Follow plugin (or BuddyBoss activity follow) is active.

Emails are not being sent

• Confirm Birthday Emails are enabled on the Email tab.
• Confirm WordPress cron is running. The daily check runs at the configured Send Time.
• Look for the “birthday-greeting” email under BuddyPress > Emails and confirm its content is set.
• Test your site’s outgoing email separately (an SMTP plugin often helps on hosts that block wp_mail).

The email templates are missing under BuddyPress > Emails

• The two templates (“birthday-greeting” and “birthday-admin-summary”) are created once, automatically, when an admin page loads while the plugin is active. Load any wp-admin page and check again.

Activity posts or notifications are not appearing

• Confirm the relevant BuddyPress component (Activity or Notifications) is active.
• Confirm the matching option is enabled on the Activity or Notifications tab.
• For notifications with Notify Friends Only off, recipients are capped (default 500). Raise or remove the cap with the bb_birthdays_notification_recipient_limit filter if you expect more.

Front-end styles or scripts look stale after an update

• Front-end assets are versioned with the plugin version, so a hard refresh or a cache purge (browser and any caching plugin or CDN) resolves a stale copy after upgrading.