If you'd like to preserve some non-MVC (non-Cake) PHP Applications while also using CakePHP, you can use Apache mod_rewrite to accomplish this.
This example assumes you have a directory named
precake that you intend to put all your legacy apps into. This folder is at the same peer level as the standard CakePHP
app folder. The legacy apps should reside in their own subfolder. Let's pretend I had legacy app for managing my contacts. I would place this in the path
/precake/contacts/. The following code is how you would modify the standard root CakePHP .htaccess file.
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^contacts$ precake/contacts/ [L]
RewriteRule ^contacts\/(.*) precake/contacts/$1 [L]
RewriteRule ^$ app/webroot/ [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^\/precake\/.*
RewriteRule (.*) app/webroot/$1 [L]
</IfModule>