Behold! One of the coolest behaviors "Bindable" is now included in CakePHP's core. Many thanks to Mariano and Felix for their efforts and including this in CakePHP's core as "Containable" behavior. I have found this behavior to be the most useful by far. I remember the nightmares I used to forgo in controlling model bindings in CakePHP 1.1, specially when coding DustJacketReview. We had to pull up so much data for a single page that we were forced to write custom queries to make it as light weight as possible. But ever since I shifted to CakePHP 1.2, things got a lot better. I have to admit that I had to find some workarounds for some situations when working with CakePHP 1.1 and specially for multiple Ajax paging within a single page. But now these nightmares are over!

Although one thing I am still concerned about is the built in pagination. It's brilliant no doubt but still I can't control the model bindings when paginating any model. I observed the code and found out that it instantiates a new instance of the model when paginating it, so even if I set the bindings to persistent, it has no effect as they are not persistent with the new object. Anyhow, a post on this matter is in the pipeline, I still need some more information to actually formally voice the issue on cake's trac. Currently I have a workaround that's working really good for me. Let's just say that I wanted more than "paginate" function to be specified within a model, and I got it