I finally got around to implementing conditional content here on Snook.ca. I've wanted to do this since I moved to the new design just over a month and a half ago. [...] With a little bit of late night development and some quick help from Larry (aka PhpNut, the lead developer of CakePHP), I've developed what I have dubbed "Elemental".

In his example he shows the two parts making up the functionality - the controller with new methods (in app_controller.php) and a new helper called "Elemental". Using the methods enableElement and disableElement you can turn off and on different chunks of code that are stored in an element array.