Cakephp-simple-menuhelper is a project mainly written in PHP, it's free.
Generates a "semi-acl" menu, based on user group.
This simple helper generates a simple html navigation menu to diferent groups. You
just need pass the group name/id to the render method and create a yaml file with the
same group name/id in the plugin config dir with the .yml extension.
The required yaml markup is pretty easy and clean, you can check a simple example at plugins/menu/config/1.yml
Just copy the plugin folder to your app plugins dir (usually /app/plugins)