For certificates that expire, Educator can email recipients before the date arrives: 30 days out, a week out, or whatever schedule suits the credential. Reminders are turned on per certificate template, and every reminder uses one site-wide message that merge fields make specific.

Turning Reminders On for a Template

1. Open the template in the designer and switch to the Award tab.
2. In the Expiry reminders section, turn on Send expiry reminders.
3. In Days before expiry, enter when to remind: whole days, from 1 to 365, up to five of them (for example, 30 and 7). Leave it empty to use the site default, which the field shows.
4. Save the template.

Reminders only ever go to certificates that have an expiry date. A template whose validity is set to Never has nothing to remind anyone about, so the section can be left off.

The Reminder Message

Navigate to Certificates > Settings > Email and find the Expiry Reminder Email section below the certificate email. It has:

• Send reminder emails: the site-wide switch. Off, and no template sends reminders regardless of its own setting.
• Subject and Body: the message. The default subject is “Reminder: {subject} expires on {expiry_date}”.
• Default reminder schedule: the days used by templates that turn reminders on without entering their own. Out of the box this is 30 and 7.
• Send Test Email: sends the reminder to your own address with sample values, marked as a test in the subject and body.

Tokens

The reminder accepts the same tokens as the certificate email ({recipient_name}, {subject}, {credential_id}, {verification_url}, {issuer_name}, {site_name}) plus two of its own:

• {expiry_date}: the date the certificate expires, in your site’s date format.
• {days_remaining}: whole days until it expires.

Any certificate merge field works too, wrapped in double braces, using the values stored with the certificate, so {{source.course_title}} names the course in a reminder just as it does in the certificate email. The Email tab lists every token with click-to-copy. See Email Notifications for the full description of each.

When Reminders Send

Once a day, the plugin looks for certificates that have reached one of their template’s reminder points and emails each one. Revoked certificates, certificates that have already expired, and certificates whose template has reminders off are never emailed.

Turning reminders on for a template covers the certificates it has already awarded, not just future ones. A certificate that is already inside a reminder window when you turn reminders on gets that reminder on the next daily run.