I came across quite a few great tutorials on how to use Cake's 1.2 ACL and Auth components, but they all seemed to be missing 1 or 2 key things. Something I realized when I got it all figured out, is that it's really not that complicated, it just takes a little getting used to.
The idea of this tutorial is to explain, step by step, how to setup a cake app using these components. My main goal is to create something that is really useful, and reusable in most apps, so if anyone has any corrections or ideas of how to simplify, I'm happy to hear them. I am by no means an expert.