On the Bakery (the CakePHP site), there's a new entry talking about how to keep bindModel and unbindModel (create/destroy associations) out of your Controller and banishing them back to where they belong.

Here I show you how to add a simple method to your Model classes that allows your controllers to specify binds directly, in a cleaner, more proper way.

They start with a simple modification to the AppModel class before implementing the associations in another class, Title, extending the new and improved AppModel. They follow with with a clean, bindModel-free Controller that sets values and reads from the associated model data.