Fairfield Halls has been specially selected to host a major global technology conference.

Thousands of software developers and technology whizz kids will attend the Croydon venue, after it was chosen to host DrupalCon's 2011 conference between August 22-26.

Drupal is a free and open source content management system.

It is used as a back-end system for 1.5 percent of all websites worldwide, including personal blogs, corporate, political and government websites, such as london.gov.uk and whitehouse.gov.

As of July 2010 an estimated 7.2 million sites used Drupal.

The annual event is held in a different country each year and features a keynote speech from Dries Buytaert, who founded the platform from his university dorm.

The event attracts users from across the globe and past conferences have been held in Barcelona, Washington, D.C and Copenhagen.

This is the first time the conference has been held in London, and the sold-out event has a growing waiting list.

DrupalCon's attendance has increased massively in the last three years. Attendance at the event in Szeged in August 2008 was 500 people, but the figure jumped to more than 3000 at Chicago conference last year.

Event organiser Neil Kent said: "Drupal is already taking Europe by storm and with an action packed agenda of high profile speakers and thousands of attendees from across the globe.

"Fairfield Halls was the ideal location to host what we hope will be the best DrupalCon event to date."