I’ve been doing a rapid build of a tool for creating team roadmaps at Automattic. We’ve got our plans spread out across P2s, and keeping track of what’s actually doing on is difficult, so naturally I yak-shaved by building a tool to help us build our tools faster.

Speed of development has been key to this project. I don’t have very much time to spend on it. So I decided to make a simple server-rendered multi-page app. But the state of UX on multi-page apps is still very 200X-era by default, requiring full-page reloads on every interaction.

Enter Unpoly.js

Just by including this script, I can add HTML attributes to do partial page loads, and offer modal interactions that allow a user to keep their context. The learning required is very little, and the documentation is pretty good.

This isn’t the only tool of its ilk, but it’s the one I chose to use after my colleague, Gage Peterson, did an exploration / comparison of options.