PHP5.5
Try/Catch/Finally is a nice article about upcoming 5.5 features – and how to use them wisely.
Enhance your select form fields
Chosen is a beautiful addon for your select dropdowns, especially if you use them to filter to search on a large set of data and if you do not yet use any AJAX here. Just add some markup and JS and you got a quick and easy way to handle them.
There are also some CakePHP Plugins for the Chosen script available already.
SQL to Cake find statements
You can use this converter to form your SQL snippets into Cake find() calls. This is especially handy for beginners, but can also be useful to automate some migration scripts etc.