Questions and postings pertaining to the usage of ImageMagick regardless of the interface. This includes the command-line utilities, as well as the C and C++ APIs. Usage questions are like "How do I use ImageMagick to create drop shadows?".
Thanks for directing me to the delegates. I've fixed the problem but I wasn't entirely sure where I hit it. Here's what I did.
1. removed libpng-devel
2. installed libpng-devel
3. downloaded and extracted ImageMagick zip file into a folder
4. ran ./configure --without-png
(i did this just to test if the error i received during make was indeed from the png library)
5. ran make
(this time there were no errors)
6. ran ./configure
(this time with options / parameters)
7. ran make
(again, the errors on the png were gone)
8. ran make install
Imagemagick installed successully afterwhich, I installed imagick for php after and checked phpinfo(). Imagick is installed and ImageMagick supported formats now include PNG.
I guess the problem lied with the libpng-devel. It may have been a faulty installation.