Netbeans is now my prefered IDE for any web development work and works especially well with PHP frameworks such as Zend Framework, Symfony and CakePHP (although not officially supported yet).
To get syntax highlighting for CakePHP ctp files, all you need to do is
- Go to Tools > Options > Miscellaneous > Files
- Add new extension, ctp, add associated it with text/x-php5


So it happens I have a website which was started as a wordpress blog but was later developed into a cakephp site.
OK, I know the title of this post is a bit long, but it does put it clearly what I had been trying to achieve using CakePHP.
Saw a couple of searches coming into my site looking for Cakephp generateList. As you can see from the