As someone who posts to kde-apps.org repeatedly one of the biggest cause of problems I encounter is users missing out the flag '-DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/usr' when running cmake.
The current situation is somewhat ridiculous, applications default to installing into /usr/local, which is in the user's application path but not in the KDE path. The result of this is an application that can load (because it's in the executable path) but not be able to find any of it's resources.
You can check your kde path by running:
kde4-config --path data
The best solution to this is to add '/usr/local' to KDE's path, this allows you to install KDE apps separately from where your package manager installs applications and save you having to worry about compile options.
To do this, set your /etc/kde4rc file to the following:
[Directories-default]
prefixes=/usr/local