I’m mostly focusing on back-end development these days, so I’m a bit behind the curve on a lot of the recent front-end practices, but I’ve been playing around with Backbone.js a bit, and one of the things that’s been nagging me is the hard dependency on JavaScript for the core functionality of the site.
Looking around for some solutions, I came across a series of posts by Zach Tollman on how the Collections theme was built. They were able to create a standard WordPress theme, and then layer all of the single-page functionality on top of it, without duplicating the templates or logic.