Birthday Calendar with ownCloud via CalDAV

Not a big issue in this blog post but an important one. Maybe I can save you some valuable time if you ever look for such a function.

As you know I’m a heavy user of ownCloud and you also might know that synchronisation is a big topic for me. And the third thing you should know that forgetting a good friend’s birthday really su… well, it’s no good style. This almost happened to me some days ago because I couldn’t check it on my Notebook with Thunderbird. My setup looks like this: All contacts (with birthday tags) in ownCloud, and these CardDAV address books are synced with my Android phone and Thunderbird/SOGo-Connector on my notebook, as well as the CalDAV calendars with Lightning.

For Android there are several free software apps which enable the inclusion of birthdays from your contacts into any calendar app. Some calendar apps even can do it theirselves. But for Thunderbird there are only some outdated add-ons. All of them don’t work with TB31 anymore and if you modify the install.rdf-file to make them run anyhow, they’re very buggy or just nonfunctional. And if you look in your ownCloud instance (where contacts‘ birthdays are visible in the calendar tab) for a downloadable/syncable calendar you’ll reach the same conclusion like me: There is none.

But there is!

And I only detected it while digging in some github issue threads. This post contains the rescuing link to a CalDAV/ICS calendar in any ownCloud version (I tested it in 7.0.2). Just modify and use following address in any application which supports CalDAV sync:

http(s)://YOUR-OC-URL/remote.php/caldav/calendars/YOUR-USER/contact_birthdays

And you know what? It works like a charm! No need for external add-ons or apps, no need for manual creation of birthday reminders, no need for apologising for (almost) missed birthdays. I just wonder why ownCloud hasn’t included this in either the webpanel or the documentation. It’s a well-working feature since at least one year, so why not including it officially? And if it’s a calendar technically, then it should also be possible to disable displaying the contacts‘ birthdays in the webpanel calendar app – a still non-existent „feature“.

So next time you have no excuse for forgetting a birthday – except for your ownCloud server’s outage ;)