If you’re not satisfied with the way Cake’s flash method works, you can easily override it in your AppController class. At the moment, the default flash method takes you to a blank page only displaying the flash message. You are then redirected to the redirect url you provided. The way I prefer flash to work is to immediately redirect the user and show the flash message on that page. This can be easily achieved by by going into app_controller.php and adding the following couple of lines:

function flash($message, $url="/")
{
   $this->Session->setFlash($message);
   $this->redirect($url);
}

You will then need to modify your layout.ctp to display the flash message whenever it is set. To do this, you’ll need to add the following lines:

if ($session->check('Message.flash')) : $session->flash(); endif;

That’s it. No need to hack cake’s core files and no need to create a custom method when you can override the existing one.