The Bakery has created a guide for CakePHP framework users to follow to set up a basic user authentication system in their application.
There has been a lot of questions about user authentication lately so I thought it was appropriate to create a tutorial that covered the very basics. In this tutorial we'll cover all aspects of MVC in an authentication role, logging a user in, maintaining a session, and restricting unauthorized access to controller actions.
The tutorial provides the different parts you'll need - the database requests, the model, controller, and view where you can just cut and paste. The wrap it up with a bit of explanation of how the parts fit together and a sample view of a login form to interface with their backend.