I posed the following questions on the CakePHP Google group.
To follow responses click here…

While CakePHP provides an EXCELLENT framework for coding PHP apps. When it comes to tools which help aid in the design phase of application development, some of you might have adopted some techniques to streamline the analysis and design phase.

For creating databases and CakePHP models, i would opt for DBDesigner combined with dbdesigner2cake.
DBDesigner allows easy creation of ERDs as well as implementation of databases in various DBMSs. dbdesigner2cake (http://dbdesigner2cake.cirello.org/) as per its site “DBDesigner 4 Scaffold Tools for CakePHP”.

But what about modeling business logic and user interfaces.
My approach would be to model business logic in DFDs (would be great to see a DFD to PHP app), while prototyping user interfaces in image manipulation tools such as Photoshop.

What form of documentation, processes and tools are folks using for application design?

UPDATE:Shorty after writing this post i stumbled across ArgoUML, it’s modular so it enables engineering of PHP code using the ArgoUML-php module (http://argouml-php.tigris.org/)

Another open source tool to consider is http://uml.sourceforge.net/index.php which is some what OS independent as well (Bonus points).