To reproduce:
bake a plugin:
bin\cake bake plugin Pluggy
bake a model in the plugin, where the table has belongsTo or hasMany associations (ie Roles):
bin\cake bake model --plugin Pluggy --no-test --force roles
bin\cake bake model --plugin Pluggy --no-test --force users
now bake the UsersController:
bin\cake bake controller --plugin Pluggy --no-test --force users
Check the UsersController::add() method and you won't see the find for the associated belongsTo table:
$roles = $this->Users->Roles->find('list',...etc) <--- *this is missing*
so it doesn't set(compact('roles'.. for the view.
If you take out the --plugin Pluggy, it will work correctly, creating the controller in src/controller, of course, not in plugins/Pluggy/src/controller.
I dug around a little in the add.ctp element template used by the controller template and inserted some debug logging after the $associations array is populated using Bake->aliasExtractor (around line 36), and it shows the array empty when baking to a plugin, filled if not. I didn't dig into the source for this aliasExtractor, but somewhere I expect a $plugin variable got left out.
DJ