Question

Is there a way to use create and at the new model at the beginn of the collection instead of appending it at the end?

Answer 1

Backbone delegates the insertion to Collection.add which means you can pass an at option to specify the position:

var C = Backbone.Collection.extend({
    url: '/echo/json/'
})
var c= new C([
    {name: 1},
    {name: 2},
    {name: 3}
]);

c.create({name: 4}, {at: 0});
console.log(c.pluck('name'));

will yield [4,1,2,3]

And a Fiddle http://jsfiddle.net/nikoshr/p6fNR/