There is a ton of information that CakePHP sets up for each request. Looking at the Controller object API, you can see that a sizable chunk is devoted to maintaining the data about the current request (as it should be) but what, if anything, are you doing with that information? Here's some tidbits I've ran into while developing a plugin that you can use to start "leaning on CakePHP" in your application.
The question comes up often enough on IRC that I thought I'd go ahead and share my development "toolchain" -- the tools I use to get work done day to day.
