cakephp/cakephp — pull request #949 by dereuromark (2012-11-12 14:42:18+00:00)
Title: DirectAuthenticate adapter

To manually log in a user I like this better than using Auth::login($data) since you could potentially have unclean data you pass into login().
Using the adapter unifies the login - always using the same method and settings like "contain" etc.

Let me know if you think this is worth adding as a core class.
I would also be OK leaving it as a plugin solution.