Protected/Private Entries? and Custom Fields, oh m

Greets everyone!
I’m an avid b2 user that can’t wait to upgrade to something else as soon as I confirm that a few required features are running.
(1) Has anyone mentioned custom field support? There was a great hack floating around that enabled custom fields to be added, which was quite nice. I added mood and music fields.
(2) A follow-up on this thread: https://www.ads-software.com/support/index.php?action=vthread&forum=4&topic=11
What’s the status on protecting entires? I realise there is a “private” status on each entry, but from what I’ve read, this only means it’s only viewable by the author. What I’d like to see (and what I ultimately had to write for myself in b2) was a way to flag an entry as private (or protected — whatever language you want to use for it) so that only people logged into b2 could read it. I think it was outlined quite clearly in the above mentioned thread: I was just wondering if there’s been any progress on this.
Thank you! And great work to the WordPress folks …
Brett