CodeIgniter authentication, permissions and admin system, or any other PHP equivilant of Django?

CodeIgniter is a basic framework which is why I love it. It does not provide Authentication, Authorization or Access Control because they are so generic it is incredibly difficult to make one that is very very easy to use.

If you would like to use a really simple authentication system try Ion Auth (the one used in PyroCMS) which works for the majority of situations but not all.

I think Django and Rails are doing a great job but both are going beyond what a normal framework is. CodeIgniter gives you enough space to code in your own conventions are greats ways of doing things instead of forcing you to spend ages working out the developers conventions instead.

Give it a go and look over PyroCMS for examples of how to use Ion Auth. As the Lead Developer of Pyro I can tell you that v1.0.2 is pretty stable. :)

And ther is also BackendPro for Codeigniter. I haven't tried it but seem like it does what you want here ...

Other than that you can try TankAuth or Erkana for auth and Zend_Acl for ACL they are pretty simple to use :)

There are numerous PHP frameworks that have their built-in Authentication:

1. CakePHP
2. Kohana
3. Yii Framework