What is the standard approach for paged collections in Backbone.js? What about sorting? Does this support these features out of the box? Do I need some kind of plugin?
None of these things are supported out of the box (Backbone is a thin library, not a large structure).
To check pagination Trunk JS Pagination
For sorting, it seems like you have a comparator in the collection in Backbone: http://documentcloud.github.com/backbone/docs/backbone.html#section-53
, , , , collection.sort. reset, .
reset