Jonathan Snook has posted a helpful trick for CakePHP users out there looking to secure sections of their site away from "normal users" and keep it only in the hands of the admins.

I just wanted to document this for easy future reference but if you don't want to hook up a complex user adminstration with authorization components, you can simply specify that the admin path be password protected in either your .htaccess file or in your httpd.conf.

This method is actually one of the built-in methods Apache has for restricting access (http authentication) that he's placed on his "/admin" directory. Call htpasswd to create the password file and you're all set to go.