Needing an explanation regarding PHP extentions - php

Question

Here is a quick overview:
I just finished compiling PHP 5.3.5 and made the attempt to compile "--with" a number of different extensions. Among the extensions that I need are mbstring and intl. I can manually phpize, configure, make, make install the mbstring extension and it seems to work fine. However, I am unable to do the same for intl.
My ./configure line looks like this:
./configure --with-openssl --with-pcre-regex --enable-calendar
--with-curl --enable-exif --enable-ftp --with-gd
--with-mhash --enable-mbstring --with-mysql --enable-zip
--enable-intl --with-icu-dir=...
The code compiles without problem: ./configure... make, make install
I used the php.ini-production for my php.ini configuration and I configured Apache to use php-cgi for a specific domain, and that works fine as well.
A quick:
<?php phpinfo() ?>
reveals that I am in fact running the newer version of PHP. However, the extensions specified in the "./configure..." line do not show up anywhere on the PHP info page.
After a bit of scouting I found that I could run phpize on a single extension in the PHP source folder, then compile a build of the specific module and install it in my PHP extension directory. After adding:
extension=MY_EXT
in my php.ini, the extension showed up on my phpinfo() page.
So can anyone explain why --with-mbstring doesn't seem to have an effect on my compilation?
I had no compilation problems for the intl extension, but moving the intl.so file to my PHP extensions directory and adding an extension line in my php.ini has no effect.

Answer 1

From php.net, have you tried
If your ICU is installed to a
non-standard directory then you might
want to specify its location in
LD_LIBRARY_PATH environment variable
so that dynamic linker can find it: $
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/opt/icu/lib
Otherwise, if PHP and ICU are
installed to their default locations,
then the additional options to
`configure' are not needed.