A generic way to serialize model instances into something you can just json.dumps

serialize_mixin.py

from django.db.models.fields import FieldDoesNotExist


class SerializeMixin(object):
    def serialize(self, recursive=True):
        data = {}
        for field in self.__class__._meta.get_all_field_names():
            try:
                self.__class__._meta.get_field(field)
                data[field] = self.serializable_value(field)
            except FieldDoesNotExist:
                if recursive:
                    try:
                        related = getattr(self, field)
                        data[field] = []
                        for obj in related.all():
                            data[field].append(obj.serialize())
                    except AttributeError:
                        pass
        return data