When more and more developers will join in the need of published but protected sites will be a great demand.
When I develop sites to clients I don’t want them to be publically viewable at all. I need to add a password function to the whole site. The page by page option is not usable at all becuase I can’t setup passwords for 50 pages and then the client needs to enter password whenever they click or navigate.
Locking down a site with password would be very useful and needed and would not be that huge of a develoment for you I guess.