MaDiN - Mathematics Education on the Web is an impressive German language project featuring mathematics resources in geometry and algebra. Presented using a well designed desktop metaphor, with a very clear 3 column format for resources. Good design, some good applets and a clear vision. The desktop metaphor serves to organise the material in a hierarchy organised first by level, then by a structured table of contents. Each resource has slots for Overview, Theory, Examples, Activities, Literature, Links, Media, Glossary and Authors. Much of this refers to offline resources with the online content appearing mostly in Examples, Links, and Media.

This site is therefore much closer in organisation to the proposed nrich pickings trail based site than to the monthly publication plus extensive database search aspects of nrich itself. In fact the most important failing of MaDiN is that there is only one hierarchical route to each resource. MaDiN also needs to do work on transitioning to XHTML/MathML or at least valid HTML. There is heavy use of javascript - so this may lead to cross browser maintenance problems.

The site's authors have invested significantly in this beautifully designed desktop metaphor, but one of them now points to Typo3 as a means of achieving a similar end with a lot less effort. Typo3 appears to be a Danish PHP/MySQL based content management system with a similar hierarchical menu. With a suitable set of templates it could be a candidate for an nrich pickings rendering engine - certailnly featureful - but suffers from HTML4 table-driven markup in its default configuration, so MathML rendering would be tricky.