Does Django have a template tag that can detect URLs and turn them into hyperlinks?
Another option is to parse plain text in some way, for example as reStructuredText (my favourite) or Markdown (Stack Overflow uses a slightly modified variant of Markdown). These will both turn valid plain text links targets into hyperlinks. This also gives you more power over what you can do; you won't need to resort to HTML to achieve some basic formatting. Note also as stated with urlize that you should only use it on plain text; it's not designed to be mixed with HTML.
When someone writes a post and copies and pastes a url in it, can Django detect it and render it as a hyperlink rather than plain text?