tipidee is fully functional, and you are encouraged to use it; however, it is not yet considered complete. There are some optional features of HTTP that would be nice to have, and that may be implemented at some point down the line.
HTTP Basic Auth is ubiquitous; and even busybox httpd implements it. It sounds silly not to have it; it would be good to add to tipidee.
However, how to implement HTTP basic auth in a secure way is not entirely obvious. Credentials should not be stored under the document root; passwords should not be stored in plain text; the credentials database should have more restrictive permissions than the configuration database; and the credentials database should be easily regenerated.
I'm leaning towards a cdb credentials database, distinct from the configuration file; but this requires a second offline text file processor, for the credentials file, and adding support for a second cdb mapping in various places in tipideed. That was more complexity than I wanted for an initial release; it's not urgent, it can wait.